Doris Lessing: Border Crossings 9781472542403, 9780826424662

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Acknowledgements

The chapters in this collection began life as papers delivered at the Second International Conference on the work of Doris Lessing, which took place at Leeds Metropolitan University in July 2007. The conference was hosted by the School of Cultural Studies and we would like to thank the School and the Doris Lessing Society for their financial support. We particularly wish to thank Pat Cook and Elaine Newsome for their invaluable administrative help in preparation for, as well as during, the conference. We would also like to thank all the members of the steering group of the Contemporary Women’s Writing Network (CWWN), particularly Professors Lucie Armitt, Clare Hanson and Mary Eagleton for their support during the conference. We owe a particular debt of thanks to Mary for her involvement in the conference planning team, her opening address at the conference, her support throughout and her clear-headed advice on publication plans afterwards. Making the transition from a collection of conference papers to a book of essays on a unifying theme is an involved and complex process, so we have greatly appreciated our contributors’ enthusiasm for the project, their timeliness and their patience with queries and suggestions. Particular thanks in this must go to Professor Judith Kegan Gardiner, for her Afterword. Finally, our thanks to Paul Gregory and Ian Strange for their support and encouragement always.

Notes on Contributors

Fiona Becket is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Leeds, UK. She is a specialist in Literary Modernism and in particular the works of D H Lawrence. Her publications include D H Lawrence: The Thinker as Poet (Macmillan, 1997) and The Complete Critical Guide to D H Lawrence (Routledge, 2002). She is co-editor, with Scott Brewster, Virginia Crossman and David Alderson of Ireland in Proximity: History, Gender, Space (Routledge, 1999) and Culture, Creativity and Environment: New Environmentalist Criticism with Terry Gifford (Rodopi, 2007). She has also edited special editions of the journals Études Lawrenciennes, The D H Lawrence Review and Moving Worlds. She is currently working on a monograph focusing on literature and the environment. Nick Bentley lectures in English literature at Keele University. His main research interests are in post-1945 British literature and literary and cultural theory, and especially in intersections of postmodernism, postcolonialism and contemporary fiction and culture. He is author of Contemporary British Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2008), Radical Fictions: The English Novel in the 1950s (Peter Lang, 2007) and editor of British Fiction of the 1990s (Routledge, 2005). He has also published journal articles on Julian Barnes, Zadie Smith, Colin MacInnes, Sam Selvon and the representations of youth in British New Left writing. He is currently working on a book on Martin Amis. Edith Frampton is the author of Michèle Roberts, forthcoming in the Northcote House series Writers and Their Work. Her essays have appeared in Textual Practice, Australian Feminist Studies and Women: A Cultural Review. An analysis of representations of the wet nurse in contemporary literature is included in the anthology Back to the Future of the Body and a consideration of Toni Morrison’s engagement with Oprah’s Book Club will appear in the forthcoming anthology Stories of Oprah. Dr. Frampton is a Lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State

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University, in California, and is a Book Reviews Editor for Contemporary Women’s Writing, published by Oxford University Press. Judith Kegan Gardiner is Professor of English and of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her books include Rhys, Stead, Lessing, and the Politics of Empathy and the edited volumes Provoking Agents: Gender and Agency in Theory and Practice; Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory; and The International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities. Her essays on Lessing appear in Doris Lessing Studies, the Blackwell Companion to the British and Irish Novel 1945–2007, and in collections of feminist literary criticism. She is also a member of the editorial collective for the interdisciplinary journal Feminist Studies. Pat Louw teaches English at the University of Zululand, South Africa. Her research has focused mainly on Doris Lessing’s African writing, and particularly her African Stories. This has led to an interest in the effect of landscape and place on the construction of identity. She has recently organized two Colloquia on Literature and Ecology in her home town of Mtunzini, a subtropical village on the East coast of South Africa. Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis teaches in the English Department of the University of Ottawa. She is the editor of Spiritual Exploration in the Works of Doris Lessing (Greenwood, 1999) and Adventures of the Spirit: The Older Woman in the Works of Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and Other Contemporary Women Writers (Ohio State UP, 2007) and co-editor of Doris Lessing: Forays into the Millennium (under consideration for publication). She is also the author of a number of articles on Doris Lessing and other writers. She is co-editor of Doris Lessing Studies and on the editorial committee of The Journal of Bahá’í Studies. Alice Ridout is Post-doctoral Research Fellow in Contemporary Women’s Writing at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK. She is currently working on a monograph charting a shift from ironic parody to nostalgia in contemporary women writers’ treatment of previous texts and histories. She is editorial assistant for the Oxford Journal Contemporary Women’s Writing, secretary to the Contemporary Women’s Writing Network and Vice-President of the Doris Lessing Society. Ruth Robbins is Head of the School of Cultural Studies at Leeds Metropolitan University. She is the author of Literary Feminisms (2000), Pater to Forster

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(2003) and Subjectivity (2005). Her edited collection, Medical Advice for Women, 1830–1915 was published by Routledge in 2009. She is currently working on a literary life of Oscar Wilde and on a co-authored book on the British Short Story. Roberta Rubenstein is Professor of Literature at American University in Washington, DC, where she teaches Modernist fiction, modern and contemporary literature by women, and feminist theory. Her publications include The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing: Breaking the Forms of Consciousness (1979); Boundaries of the Self: Gender, Culture, Fiction (1987); Home Matters: Longing and Belonging, Nostalgia and Mourning in Women’s Fiction (2001); and over thirty essays on women writers, including Woolf, Lessing, Atwood, Drabble, Kingsolver, Morrison and others. Her new book, Virginia Woolf and the Russian Point of View, will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2009. Susan Watkins is Reader in Twentieth-Century Women’s Fiction in the School of Cultural Studies at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK. She is the author of Twentieth-Century Women Novelists: Feminist Theory into Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001) and co-editor, with Graham Atkin and Chris Walsh, of Studying Literature: A Practical Introduction (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1995) and Scandalous Fictions: The Twentieth-Century Novel in the Public Sphere, with Jago Morrison (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). She edited a special issue of the Journal of Gender Studies (with Mary Eagleton) in 2006 on the future of fiction and the future of feminism and in 2008 a symposium on Doris Lessing for the Journal of Commonwealth Literature (with Claire Chambers). She is currently writing a book on Doris Lessing for Manchester University Press’s Contemporary World Writers series.

Introduction: Doris Lessing’s Border Crossings Alice Ridout and Susan Watkins Leeds Metropolitan University, UK

‘Oh, Christ!’ was Doris Lessing’s reaction to her receipt of the Nobel Prize. Indeed, some in the literary establishment and media seemed to share her view. Harold Bloom famously called the academy’s decision ‘pure political correctness’ and suggested that despite having had ‘a few admirable qualities’ in her early work, he has found ‘her work for the past 15 years quite unreadable . . . fourth-rate science fiction’ (Crown). Malcolm A Kline in a review for the website ‘Accuracy in Media’ expressed amazement that ‘the Nobel Prize authorities and the academic elite lionize a writer who denounces both communism and feminism’, arguing that Lessing received the prize ‘for the opinions she held before she changed her mind’. Other reactions, in contrast, were celebratory and focused particularly closely on the significance of Lessing’s work for feminism. Feministing.com posted a headline stating ‘Doris Lessing wins Nobel Prize for Literature!’ and Yahoo! Answers ran a discussion forum asking for ‘Thoughts on feminist Doris Lessing winning the Nobel Prize for literature?’ The Nobel Foundation’s own bio-bibliography of Lessing located her contribution to gender politics as central to her literary achievement, stating that ‘The Golden Notebook (1962) was Doris Lessing’s real breakthrough. The burgeoning feminist movement saw it as a pioneering work and it belongs to the handful of books that informed the twentieth-century view of the male–female relationship’. Significantly, the blogs of science fiction fans were also celebratory. SFScope.com (‘your source of news about the speculative fiction fields’) posted a piece of significant length on Lessing’s Nobel Prize, concluding with the statement that ‘Lessing was a Guest of Honor at the 1987 World Science Fiction Convention in Brighton, England, and appears to be the first WorldCon GoH1 to win the Nobel Prize for Literature’ (Strock).

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It is clear that SF fans recognize (if academic criticism often has not) that Lessing’s work within the speculative fiction genres and her moves into and out of the fantastic have allowed her a creative flexibility. As Roberta Rubenstein, Ruth Robbins and Fiona Becket suggest in their essays in this collection, the move away from realism has been critical in enabling Lessing to explore issues such as the ‘problem’ of maternity, the significance of the child figure and ecological disaster. In their attempt to take a balanced approach to Lessing and her work in their review of the award of the Nobel Prize for the New York Times, Motoko Rich and Sarah Lyall repeatedly allude to Lessing’s contradictions and controversies: Ms. Lessing, who joined the Communist Party in Africa, repudiated Marxist theory during the Hungarian crisis of 1956, a view for which she was criticized by some British academics . . . Although she has been held up as an early heroine of feminism, Ms. Lessing later disavowed that she herself was a feminist, for which she received the ire of some British critics and academics. (Rich and Lyall) Even their opening description of Lessing as a ‘Persian-born, Rhodesianraised and London-residing novelist’ points to the difficulty of categorizing Lessing. This collection of essays takes as its starting point Lessing’s resistance to categorization and her persistent impulse to cross borders of all kinds in her work and life. It is, of course, possible to be critical of, even angry at, Lessing’s changes of opinion and the ways in which the political impact of her work contradicts her stated political commitments. Instead, as we explore her 57-year publishing career, these essays embrace these contradictory aspects of Lessing’s writing and view her ‘border crossings’ as integral to her work. Given that most reactions to Lessing’s Nobel Prize told us more about how the reviewer positioned Lessing – as a feminist or anti-feminist, as a science fiction writer or a realist who lost her way, as a Marxist or a reactionary, as a British writer or a postcolonial one – than they did about Lessing herself or her work, it seems imperative to explore Lessing’s transgressions of these borders at this late stage in her career. The Nobel Prize drew attention back to a writer who has been retreating from the spotlight just at the moment that she published what she has announced will be her last novel, Alfred and Emily. As she replied in a recent interview ( July 2008) to Deborah Solomon’s question about whether she still writes every day: ‘No. I have run out of energy completely. I have ideas that I will probably never write now. You know, I have written quite a lot, so it is not

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really enough to weep over.’ Thus, this is the perfect moment for an assessment of Lessing’s ‘quite a lot’ of writing. We have deliberately selected these essays to reflect the wide range of Lessing’s work and the varied contexts in which it signifies. The essays address Lessing’s earliest work – The Grass is Singing – through to her highly controversial 2007 novel, The Cleft. The essays are presented in chronological order according to the date of publication of the work by Lessing they focus on. As Lessing so famously commented of The Golden Notebook that her ‘major aim was to shape a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped’ (13), so do we, too, hope that the organization of this collection of essays will make a ‘wordless statement’ about Lessing’s border crossings by mapping her shifts across all kinds of borders – geographical, ideological and generic. The collection actively engages with the many different genres she has employed from the short story to the multilayered metafictional novel, from science fiction to autobiography, in order more fully to explore the implications of those artistic choices that featured so noticeably in the reactions to her Nobel Prize. The centrality of the metaphor of border crossings to Lessing’s life and work is most clearly evident in her autobiography, in the literal border crossings implied by Motoko and Lyall’s hyphenated phrase: ‘Persian-born, Rhodesian-raised and London-residing novelist’. Doris Lessing was born as Doris May Tayler on 22 October 1919 in Kermanshah in what was then Persia but is now Iran. Her father, Alfred Cook Tayler, was a bank official who had been a captain in the British army during the First World War. Lessing’s mother, Emily Maude McVeagh, was a nurse and developed a relationship with Lessing’s father while she nursed him during the war. Lessing sees herself very clearly as a child of the First World War and the title of her long series of semi-autobiographical novels – Children of Violence – reflects this. In 1925, after a very brief return to England, the Taylers moved out to a farm in what was Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). After two marriages (one in 1939 to Frank Charles Wisdom and another in 1945 to Gottfried Lessing), Lessing left Rhodesia for London leaving behind the two children from her first marriage but taking with her a son from her second marriage. These literal border crossings are central to the themes and settings of Lessing’s work. Her first novel, The Grass is Singing (1950), is set in Rhodesia and explores the relationship between a white mistress and her black servant. As Edith Frampton suggests, however, in her essay on cultural boundaries and abjection, skin colour is only one of the significant borders that are crossed in the novel. Frampton’s exploration of the protagonist,

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Mary Turner’s disgust at seeing African babies breast feeding resonates with Lessing’s own problematic and complex attitudes to motherhood. Similarly, the early novels in her semi-autobiographical sequence ‘Children of Violence’ are set in ‘Zambesia’, a fictionalized Rhodesia, and they also explore Lessing’s experiences of maternity.2 In The Golden Notebook, the protagonist-artist, Anna, is living off the profits from an earlier novel, Frontiers of War, which is set in Southern Africa. Anna is deeply critical of her own nostalgic representation of her earlier experiences in Frontiers of War and in her notebooks she forces herself to be more honest and critical of her own attitudes to Southern Africa and to race. Lessing’s ongoing concern about Southern Africa is clearly evident in one of her most recent texts – her Nobel Prize acceptance speech – where she focuses on the relative importance of literacy and the availability of books in the United Kingdom and Southern Africa. Lessing’s relationship to colonial Rhodesia is a complex one. She has suggested that the Communist party’s engagement with racism, colonialism and the colour bar was a central attraction to her. Yet her autobiographical writings make it clear that she had little contact with black Southern African people due to the difficulties of crossing the colour bar. Despite all her efforts to the contrary, the history of her parents’ arrival in Rhodesia positioned Lessing firmly in the role of colonial settler-invader. Indeed, to explore Lessing’s life during this period and her subsequent writings about these experiences is to see most clearly the complex permeations of the ‘colonial’ and ‘postcolonial’ before, during and after Independence. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin outline these ambivalences in their introduction to The Post-Colonial Studies Reader: The term ‘post-colonial’ is resonant with all the ambiguity and complexity of the many different cultural experiences it implicates, and . . . it addresses all aspects of the colonial process from the beginning of colonial contact. Post-colonial critics and theorists should consider the full implications of restricting the meaning of the term to ‘aftercolonialism’ or after-Independence. All post-colonial societies are still subject in one way or another to overt or subtle forms of neo-colonial domination, and independence has not solved this problem. The development of new élites within independent societies, often buttressed by neo-colonial institutions; the development of internal divisions based on racial, linguistic or religious discriminations; the continuing unequal treatment of indigenous peoples in settler/invader societies – all these testify to the fact that post-colonialism is a continuing process of resistance and reconstruction. This does not imply that post-colonial practices

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are seamless and homogeneous but indicates the impossibility of dealing with any part of the colonial process without considering its antecedents and consequences. (2) No where could this call to be alert to the ongoing ambiguous and complex continuities of the postcolonial project be more relevant than in Zimbabwe. Lessing’s life crossed the border between colonial Rhodesia and independent Zimbabwe and her writings attest to her continuing concern with that country’s relation to narratives of colonialism, nationalism and decolonization. This can be seen clearly in Pat Louw’s examination of Lessing’s early African stories, in which she sees the crossing and unsettling of those colonial boundaries that are key to white settler culture – boundaries of home, property and landscape – as a continuing preoccupation. Louw’s focus on children as particularly able to cross those boundaries may well have an autobiographical resonance for Lessing who describes her childhood love of the African bush with affectionate detail in volume one of her autobiography, Under My Skin. A concern with the border between the colonial project and resistance to that project is central to Lessing’s most famous novel, The Golden Notebook. During one of the sections of the black notebook set at the Mashopi Hotel, Paul subtly critiques their little Communist circle’s optimism by pointing out that whether Rhodesia embraces socialism or capitalism the effect will be the same: [B]ecause a government faced with the necessity of housing a lot of unhoused people fast, whether socialist or capitalist, will choose the cheapest available houses, the best being the enemy of the better, this fair scene will be one of factories smoking into the fair blue sky, and masses of cheap identical housing. (381) No matter what the ideological motivation of those who may emerge to move Rhodesia forward – ‘whether socialist or capitalist’, anti-colonial or imperialist – every future government of Rhodesia would have to deal with the historical impact of colonialism. Colonialism had so deeply implanted a racially unequal economic structure in Rhodesia that its colonial history guaranteed it a difficult future. Robert Mugabe’s regime in Zimbabwe sadly proved Paul’s negative predictions to be justified, indeed, even to have been too optimistic. The Golden Notebook dramatizes Anna and her comrades’ attempts to imagine and fight for a postcolonial, non-racist future in Rhodesia. However,

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they are repeatedly forced to admit the limitations of their efforts and the negative implications of their ideologies. Despite their racial politics, or, indeed, perhaps because of their racial politics, the effects of the Communist group on Jackson, the black chef at Mashopi, are disastrous. George has an affair with Jackson’s wife that results in a child and he is completely aware of his own hypocrisy: ‘I’m a socialist,’ said George. ‘And as far as it’s possible in this hell-hole I try to be a socialist and fight the colour bar. Well? I stand on platforms and make speeches – oh, very tactfully of course, saying that the colour bar is not in the best interests of all concerned, and gentle Jesus meek and mild wouldn’t have approved, because it’s more than my job is worth to say it’s inhuman and stinkingly immoral and the whites are damned to eternity for it. And now I propose to behave just like every other stinking white sot who sleeps with a black woman and adds another half-caste to the Colony’s quota.’ (129) Anna’s reaction to George’s confession of his implication in racist colonial power is equally problematic, as she finds herself ‘ashamed and angry’ to discover that she ‘resented the fact the woman was black’ (130). Having added another mouth to feed to Jackson’s family, the group of white Communists creates a terrible crisis for Jackson by causing him to lose his job, his home and his family. Paul repeatedly flaunts his friendship with Jackson, thereby upsetting the white hotel owner, Mrs Boothby. She finally decides she will tolerate no more when she walks into the kitchen to find a drunken Jimmy embracing Jackson and asking him whether he loves him. The combination of a taboo inter-racial relation with an equally taboo samesex one displayed in this embrace shocks Mrs Boothby into firing Jackson on the spot. ‘Take your dirty family and yourself away from here’ she instructs him (145). These Mashopi sections of The Golden Notebook explore with painful accuracy and honesty the difficulty for white people of contributing to a postcolonial future. This theme emerges again in The Sweetest Dream (2001) where Lessing displays great cynicism over the effects of non-governmental organizations in post-independence ‘Zimlia’ (a thinly veiled Zimbabwe). Emerging from the experiences of the postcolonial, contemporary theories of cosmopolitanism offer another way of viewing Lessing’s border crossings, as Alice Ridout suggests in her essay on Lessing and ‘TCKs’ (‘third culture kids’). Cosmopolitans have often, like Lessing, had privileged experiences of colonialism and postcolonialism. In many ways, cosmopolitanism shares much with communism in that it embraces a worldwide view.

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The recent return to cosmopolitan thought is an attempt to address the impact and importance of these kinds of experiences, despite their clearly more privileged status. Discussions of cosmopolitanism attempt to move beyond the confrontational model of early postcolonial thought where the emphasis was on the project of ‘writing back’ to Empire in order to engage with those who have more complicated relationships to Empire, colony and postcolonialism. As Bruce Robbins explains in his introduction to Cosmopolitics: Understood as a fundamental devotion to the interests of humanity as a whole, cosmopolitanism has often seemed to claim universality by virtue of its independence, its detachment from the bonds, commitments, and affiliations that constrain ordinary nation-bound lives. It has seemed to be a luxuriously free-floating view from above. But many voices now insist, with Paul Rabinow, that the term should be extended to transnational experiences that are particular rather than universal and that are unprivileged – indeed, often coerced. (1) As the white child of farmer settlers, it would be possible to view Lessing as occupying a ‘luxuriously free-floating view from above’. However, her work demonstrates her concern to describe her ‘transnational experiences’ in their particularities and Anna in The Golden Notebook is clearly uncomfortable with her coerced racial privilege. Caught between the benefits of a position of privilege and a philosophical and theoretical rejection of that privilege, Lessing’s complex relationship to white Southern-African settler-invader culture plays out debates about cosmopolitanism ‘from above’ and ‘below’. Understanding Lessing’s work in relation to cosmopolitanism also complicates the national labelling of Lessing as ‘English’ or ‘British’. In their announcement of the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature, for example, the Nobel committee designated her as an ‘English writer’; yet Lessing’s writing has worldwide appeal.3 Viewing Lessing as a cosmopolitan writer may also throw light on the subject of where in the world academic work on Lessing tends to be supported and published. Despite having lived in London since 1949, Lessing’s writing has received more critical attention in the United States than it has in the United Kingdom. A large proportion of the book-length studies of her work have come out of the United States and the active Doris Lessing Society is an American-based, Modern Languages Association affiliated organization. Indeed, one of the goals of the committee for the Second International Doris Lessing Conference which was held at Leeds Metropolitan University in July 2007 was to bring Lessing studies

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‘home’ to the United Kingdom.4 This goal is evident at the end of Nick Bentley’s essay when he positions Lessing in what he specifically identifies as a ‘British postmodernism’. It is certainly the case that the first generation of critics writing in the United States were women academics drawn to Lessing’s writing as what Gayle Greene terms ‘“women’s writing,” centering on women’s consciousness and concerns’ (15). Greene documents the attraction for women academics in the United States of Lessing’s ‘crucial role in the consolidation of the movement that took place in the course of the decade (the 1960s)’ (19). The Golden Notebook was, of course, heralded by feminists as speaking to and for them. Published in 1962, the novel’s focus on the experience of ‘free women’ in the 1950s provided influential models for second-wave feminists to follow regarding such issues as reproductive rights (the ‘politics of the personal’) and the intersections between women’s domestic labour in the home and their role in the public sphere in the wage-labour force. The novel focuses on the work that women do as housewives, carers and mothers, their role within the family and outside it and their attempts to move outside marital and familial structures. Gayle Greene argues that ‘Lessing’s novels helped make the second wave of feminism’ (19); Rachel Blau du Plessis called The Golden Notebook ‘the first tampax in world literature’ (279–80). Yet in many ways the book makes uncomfortable reading for women readers. In The Shadow of the Third, the novel that Anna writes in the yellow notebook, Ella, the heroine, believes that ‘integrity is the orgasm’, wonders whether she could ever climax with a man she didn’t love and believes that vaginal orgasms are superior to clitoral ones because the latter are ‘substitute’ and ‘fake’ (200). Of course we can’t accuse Lessing on the grounds of opinions expressed by her characters, but it remains the case that the novel forces us to rethink our assumptions about feminist writing and feminism criticism, much as it does postcolonial criticism. Two of the central questions the novel explores (suggested in quite an obvious way by the discussion of sex above) are the basic ones of how different women are from men and why. A corollary for the novel and feminism itself is the question of how feminist aims and objectives might best deal with a variety of answers to these questions. The novel’s focus on the ‘free’ woman’s financial independence, personal space and tangential relation to conventional marital and familial structures might accord with firstwave feminism’s focus on legal and political equality. It might also seem to fit with liberal feminism’s assumption that men and women are pretty similar; that differences between them are socially constructed and that women merely want equality of opportunity within existing social structures. By contrast, the novel’s serious and detailed consideration of

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menstruation, sexuality and the intimacy of caring for young children might suggest a radical feminist agenda, which would focus on those supposedly essential biological differences between men and women that create positive, enriching aspects to feminine experience and subjectivity. The different ways of defining feminine identity and woman’s ‘difference’ suggested here have been echoed, of course, in a variety of feminisms. One of the novel’s achievements is, then, to develop the idea of the plurality of both women’s experience and feminist interpretations of that experience. In an important way, Lessing anticipates Judith Butler’s argument in Gender Trouble, that It is no longer clear that feminist theory ought to try to settle the questions of primary identity in order to get on with the task of politics. Instead, we ought to ask, what political possibilities are the consequence of a radical critique of the categories of identity. What new shape of politics emerges when identity as a common ground no longer constrains the discourse on feminist politics? And to what extent does the effort to locate a common identity as the foundation for a feminist politics preclude a radical inquiry into the political construction and regulation of identity itself? (ix) Lessing’s intention that the novel should ‘talk through the way it was shaped’ (Preface to The Golden Notebook 13) suggests just such a focus on process, rather than categorization. Although characters like Anna and Ella do, on occasion, make homophobic remarks, as we have seen in the previous discussion of the Mashopi hotel sequence and the overlapping between crossracial and same-sex relations, Lessing’s work, like Butler’s, is also capable of considering how queer sexuality can ‘trouble’ gender definitions and complicate feminism’s primary focus on gender.5 Lessing’s discomfort with the tag ‘feminist’ writer echoes her increasingly dismissive attitude to her Communist past. She has accused feminism of unthinkingly ‘rubbishing men’ and failing to achieve concrete progress on the issue of childcare (Gibbons). Yet, as we have seen, assessments of her work immediately after the news broke of the award of the Nobel Prize tended to return to the significance of The Golden Notebook for feminism and her place in the lives of many women writers and academics is clear. As Greene remarks, ‘It would be difficult to overstate the impact The Golden Notebook had on women of my generation, the direct and immediate identification we felt with it, the thrill of recognition’ (16). Ironically, critical evaluation of Lessing’s work seems to get stuck on exactly these questions of what Butler terms ‘primary identity’ (i.e. is Lessing’s work feminist or not?).

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We might want to focus instead on how her writing engages in what Butler would call ‘a new shape of feminist politics’; one that takes its cue from deconstructive readings of gender identity categories. In her essay on the Jane Somers hoax, during which Lessing temporarily abandoned her authorial identity and published under a pseudonym, Susan Watkins argues that Lessing anticipates a growing body of feminist criticism precisely concerned with the relationship between gendered and authorial identities and commercial literary culture. If Lessing’s relationship with feminism has been equivocal, to say the least, so has her involvement with Communism. It is certainly possible that the more widespread and continued tradition of engagement with Socialism, Communism and the Left among British intellectuals explains the lack of attention (when compared with the United States) that her work has received in British academic circles. Lessing’s involvement with Communism began in the 1940s in Southern Rhodesia (although she claims not to have officially joined the Party until 1951 in London6) and continued until 1956, a period of her life she writes about in A Ripple from the Storm, The Golden Notebook and in the first and second volumes of her autobiography, Under My Skin and Walking in the Shade. Recently, she suggested that she only ‘had about two years of the pure “being a Communist” in Southern Rhodesia. It disappeared very fast because I was married to a 150% Communist, Gottfried Lessing. That cures you very quickly’ (Appignanesi). There is no doubt that her memories of this period are marked by the trauma of the decision to leave the British Communist Party in 1956, after the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in which Khrushchev denounced Stalin. This pattern of enthusiasm and disillusionment is common to many memoirs and books detailing religious and political involvement of various kinds, but is particularly apparent in accounts of the Communist Party in the period from the 1930s to the 1950s.7 Paul Foot, for example, as a committed Socialist, sees Lessing’s writing career as indicative (but not quite typical) of the familiar trajectory of ‘former socialist who has grown into a petulant reactionary’ (Foot). It would therefore be understandable if one found in Lessing’s writing an unselfconscious attempt to demonstrate the wisdom of hindsight; in other words, an urge to rewrite the past and position political enthusiasm and engagement as naïve and uncritical. However, that is not quite what one finds in her work. As previously noted, Lessing has, on more than one occasion, explained that she got involved with communism in the Southern Rhodesia of the 1940s because the Communists ‘were the only people I had ever met who fought the colour bar in their lives’ (Going Home 248) as if to

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suggest that it was not communism itself that attracted her. This might seem to be a clear attempt to rationalize after the event. However, as well as expressing elsewhere in her work a suspicion of nostalgia for a radical past, she is also critical of the impulse to justify and rewrite in the light of more recent events and notes the tone of dry cynicism that accompanies that impulse. In The Golden Notebook, for example, Anna attempts in the black notebook to narrate more truthfully the events that made their way into her successful novel Frontiers of War. She is terrified throughout this process of the seductive attractions of nostalgia, but also remarks that she can’t remember her time in the Party in Southern Africa during the years of the Second World War without a comforting cynicism; ‘a terrible dry anguish’ (99). This tone emerges when she explains, ironically, that the Southern Rhodesian Communist Party at that time was, in theory if not in practice, opposed to Black Nationalism as a ‘right-wing deviation’ (99) from the Party line, a position that, by the 1950s time of composition of The Golden Notebook has become completely untenable in the light of decolonization and nationalism in the former British Empire. Yet she knows too that ‘that pain is like the dangerous pain of nostalgia, its first cousin and just as deadly’ (99) and decides that she will only continue her narrative when she can avoid that tone. There is not, after all, much of a border between nostalgia and cynicism when remembering previous political enthusiasms. Lessing’s work certainly questions many of the axioms of Marxist and materialist criticism; her writing has often puzzled over the vexed question of the relation between literary and other kinds of production and drew in the 1950s, as Nick Bentley articulates in his essay on The Golden Notebook, on the ideas of Bertolt Brecht and Georg Lukács and current debates in Leftist intellectual circles on the ideology of literary form. Lessing begins her career as a writer of realist novels (although the realism is often more strained than it seems at first glance) whose fiction is apparently about ‘the individual conscience in its relations with the collective’ (‘The Small Personal Voice’, 18). In 1957 she writes about the importance of ‘commitment’ and argues that both Western literature’s luxurious existential despair and Communist literature’s ‘cheerful little tract about economic advance’ are flawed because, They are the opposite sides of the same coin. One sees man as the isolated individual unable to communicate, helpless and solitary; the other as collective man with a collective conscience. Somewhere between these two, I believe, is a resting point, a place of decision, hard to reach and precariously balanced. (‘The Small Personal Voice’ 15)

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Her understanding of the individual author and the novel as nodal points which are both products of and comments on material and economic contexts is tested further in The Golden Notebook. In this novel, the relation between history and fiction, ‘representation’ and ‘reality’; the linguistic and the material; the art object and its economic and historical moment become the very subjects and the warp and woof of the book. This continues to be a preoccupation, as Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis argues, even in one of Lessing’s most recent works, The Cleft. In this sense, The Golden Notebook embodies what Fredric Jameson terms the ideology of form, ‘the determinate contradiction of the specific messages emitted by the varied sign systems which coexist in a given artistic process as well as in its general social formation’ (84). We would argue, therefore, that contradiction is not one of the novel’s (and Lessing’s) failings, but a strategic attempt to embody, in a creative process of border crossing, the dynamic relation between supposedly opposing ideas.

Notes 1

2

3 4

5

6 7

‘WorldCon GOH’ is the accepted shorthand for ‘World Science Fiction Convention Guest of Honour’ among fans and scholars of speculative fiction. This theme of maternity emerges repeatedly throughout Lessing’s career. In her essay, Ruth Robbins explores The Fifth Child in relation to ‘unmaking maternal ideals’. See Claire Sprague’s In Pursuit of Doris Lessing: Nine Nations Reading. All the essays in this collection were presented at the Second International Doris Lessing conference in July 2007. In her article, ‘Historicizing Homophobia in The Golden Notebook and “The Day Stalin Died” ’, Judith Kegan Gardiner argues that ‘Anna’s homophobia in the novel is shown as fitting her character and changing situations throughout the novel. It develops from bemused wartime tolerance to hysterical 1950s counteridentification in parallel with both historical changes in British and Communist Party attitudes and with the demands of a narrative shaped to record Anna’s progress towards psychological crackup’ (17). Doris Lessing, Under My Skin, Volume I of my Autobiography, to 1949, 275. See, for example, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1941), The God that Failed (1950; 2001) Ed. Richard H. Crossman.

Works Cited Appignanesi, L. ‘Interview: Doris Lessing’. 6 Nov 2002. http://www.bookforum. net/interview_lessing.html [Web. 25 Nov 2008].

Introduction

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Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. eds. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 1995. Blau Du Plessis, Rachel. ‘For the Etruscans’, The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory. Ed. Elaine Showalter. London: Routledge, 1989. pp. 271–91. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge, 1990. Crossman, Richard H. ed. The God that Failed. 1950. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Crown, Sarah. ‘Doris Lessing Wins Nobel Prize’. 11 Oct 2007. Guardian News and Media Ltd. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/oct/11/nobelprize. awardsandprizes [Web. 25 Nov 2008]. Feministing.com. ‘Doris Lessing Wins Nobel Prize for Literature!’ 11 Oct 2007. http://www.feministing.com/archives/007902.html [Web. 25 Nov 2008]. Foot, Paul. ‘The Lessing Legend’. Socialist Review 216. Feb 1998. http://pubs. socialistreviewindex.org.uk/sr216/foot.htm [Web. 25 Nov 2008]. Gardiner, Judith Kegan. ‘Historicizing Homophobia in The Golden Notebook and “The Day Stalin Died”’. Doris Lessing Studies, Winter, 25: 2 (2006), 14–18. Gibbons, Fiachr. ‘Lay Off Men, Lessing Tells Feminists’. Guardian Unlimited, 14 Aug 2001. http://www.guardian.co.uk/ 2001/aug/14/edinburghfestival2001. edinburghbookfestival2001 [Web. 31 Jul 2002]. Greene, Gayle. Doris Lessing: The Poetics of Change. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. 1981. Rev. edn. London: Routledge, 2002. Kline, Malcolm A. ‘Children of a Lesser Lessing’. Accuracy in Media. 6 Nov 2007. http://www.aim.org/aim-column/children-of-a-lesser-lessing/ [Web. 25 Nov 2008]. Koestler, Arthur. Darkness at Noon. 1941. Rev. edn. London: Vintage Classics, 1994. Lessing, Doris. Alfred and Emily. London: Fourth Estate, 2008. — Children of Violence. 5 Vols. London: Michael Joseph and McGibbon and Kee, 1952–1969. — The Cleft. London: Fourth Estate, 2007. — Going Home. 1957. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. — The Golden Notebook. 1962. Rev. edn. London: Flamingo, 1993. — The Grass is Singing. 1950. London: Paladin, 1989. — ‘The Small Personal Voice’. A Small Personal Voice: Essays, Reviews, Interviews. Ed. Paul Schlueter. London: Flamingo, 1994. pp. 7–25. — The Sweetest Dream. London: Flamingo, 2001. — Under My Skin: Volume 1 of My Autobiography, to 1949. London: Harper Collins, 1994. — Walking in the Shade, Volume 2 of My Autobiography, 1949–1962. London: Flamingo, 1998. Rich, Motoko and Sarah Lyall. ‘Doris Lessing Wins Nobel Prize in Literature’. NYTimes.com. 11 Oct 2007. The New York Times Company. http://www. nytimes.com/2007/10/11/world/11cnd-nobel.html?_r=1&oref=slogin [Web. 25 Nov 2008].

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Robbins, Bruce. ‘Introduction Part 1: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism’. In Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Cultural Politics Vol. 14. Eds. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Solomon, Deborah. ‘A Literary Light: Questions for Doris Lessing’. 27 July 2008. The New York Times Company. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/magazine/ 27wwln-Q4-t.html?_r=2&ref=magazine&oref=slogin&oref=slogin [Web. 25 Nov 2008]. Sprague, Claire. ed. In Pursuit of Doris Lessing: Nine Nations Reading. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990. Strock, Ian Randal. ‘Doris Lessing Wins Nobel Prize for Literature’. 11 Oct 2007. SFScope.com http://sfscope.com/2007/10/doris-lessing-wins-nobel-prize.html [Web. 25 Nov 2008]. Yahoo! Answers. ‘Thoughts on feminist Doris Lessing winning the Nobel Prize for Literature?’ n.d. http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071011143 151AAgB7Jj [Web. 25 Nov 2008].

Chapter 1

Horrors of the Breast: Cultural Boundaries and the Abject in The Grass is Singing Edith Frampton San Diego State University, CA

Doris Lessing’s initially well-received but subsequently neglected 1950 debut novel, The Grass is Singing,1 is a searching narrative of cultural boundaries, the nature of their enforcement and the potential for their transgression. The most apparent signifier of these boundaries is skin, which defines multiple border zones between people of the mid-century Southern Rhodesian society that Lessing depicts. At the most obvious, social level, it is primarily the different skin colours of the European colonizers, on one hand, and the indigenous Africans, on the other, that demarcate the two most fundamental social groups in the world of Mary Turner, Lessing’s tragic protagonist. From a phenomenological perspective, skin also marks the border between each subject and the external world, separating individuals while also potentially uniting them in the chiasmic tactile encounter that French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty theorized, also in the mid-century period.2 However, just as socially and phenomenologically pertinent as skin to Lessing’s novel, albeit less obviously so, is milk, and the border zones that it transgresses. The Grass is Singing is significantly preoccupied with the nadir of the abject, as this concept has been theorized by Julia Kristeva and others, and that nadir is signified, in part, by breast milk and its scandalous crossings of conceptual boundaries. The lactating female breast emerges as a fundamental site of societal and psychological regulation within the cultural sphere of the The Grass is Singing. Yet it simultaneously marks the site of Lessing’s most subversive gesture in the novel, the ultimate renunciation of patriarchy by Mary Turner, who, as her very name suggests, makes an aboutface over the course of the novel and merrily (re)turns to the semiotic and the abject, before her violent crossing over the final border of death.

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In support of this claim, it is productive to turn to a theoretical study published 30 years after Lessing’s novel, by a similarly border-crossing, selfexiled writer.3 Skin and milk, together, make a provocatively prominent appearance at the opening of Julia Kristeva’s influential 1980 Powers of Horror, in which Kristeva analyses ‘those violent, dark revolts of being’ that characterize ‘abjection’ (1). As I hope to show, an exploration of the abject and abjection opens up Lessing’s first novel in fecund ways, in terms of both individual and collective identity constructions. The analysis of Lessing in relation to Kristeva is something that Clare Hanson called for in 1987, in her essay ‘Doris Lessing in Pursuit of the English, or, No Small Personal Voice’, as part of a persuasive argument that Lessing is less the realist for which she has been mistaken than a postmodernist writer, who is aligned with thinkers such as Kristeva. However, up until this point, this has not been a direction that Lessing scholars have readily pursued. In what follows, the aptness of Hanson’s suggestion is, I hope, amply illustrated. The very first narrative of abjection with which Kristeva opens her analysis in Powers of Horror combines, interestingly, both skin and milk. She describes a horrified response to skin forming on the surface of warm milk. In this case, it is neither human skin nor human milk that causes the repugnance that Kristeva will define as abjection; it is instead the glutinous surface film that can form on the top of cows’ milk, when heated. Kristeva thus reflects that, [W]hen the eyes see or the lips touch that skin on the surface of milk – harmless, thin as a sheet of cigarette paper, pitiful as a nail paring – I experience a gagging sensation and, still farther down, spasms in the stomach, the belly; and all the organs shrivel up the body, provoke tears and bile, increase heartbeat, cause forehead and hands to perspire. (2–3) Using this as her exemplary, opening case, Kristeva thus defines the abject as a, massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which familiar as it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me as radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either. A ‘something’ that I do not recognize as a thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me. (2, emphasis added) I will return to the notion that the abject is somehow familiar, while, at the same time, being deeply alienating, but I first want to make the important point that, for Kristeva, the abject is that which simultaneously bolsters and

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threatens boundaries. It defines the outlines of identity by casting out that which is excluded from identity, just as that glutinous surface film delineates the warmed cows’ milk from the air surrounding it. Explicating Kristeva for a broad readership, Sarah Gamble describes the tenuous processes of identity formation through which abjection comes into play, in this way: [T]o take up a position within the symbolic order, the individual subject must define itself as independent, and reject anything which threatens that sense of autonomous, unique selfhood. Abjection, however, testifies to the fact that such control is only ever partial. Because it draws attention to the precariousness of identity, the abject is associated with all that the subject perceives as being unclean and potentially polluting: food, bodily wastes, and vomit, for example, all of which serve to remind the subject that it cannot escape basic biological drives over which it has no influence. (185) The complex, ambiguous revulsion that constitutes abjection certainly characterizes Mary Turner’s relationship to the native Africans whom she encounters when she moves from the city to her husband’s farm, and specifically her relationship to Moses, within The Grass is Singing. Mary ‘hated it when they spoke to each other in dialects she did not understand’; she ‘hated their half-naked, thick-muscled black bodies stooping in the mindless rhythm of their work’; and ‘she hated more than anything, with a violent physical repulsion, the heavy smell that came from them, a hot, sour animal smell’ (115). Her viscerally manifested hatred thus circulates around both language and the body. In a statement evocative of Kristeva’s description of the physical nausea of abjection, Mary tells her husband, with a shudder: ‘they all make me sick’ (116). Applying Kristeva’s theories, the abjection that Mary Turner experiences in relation to Moses and the other native Africans involves a basic, unconsciously perceived threat to her sense of identity, to her precariously constructed fortress of selfhood. The insistence of their inescapable embodiment is a psychically painful reminder to Mary of the physicality of her own body, and this causes her nausea. However, in keeping with the ambiguities of abjection that Kristeva notes, the passionate revulsion towards Moses that Mary feels is simultaneously an attraction. In her insightful 1989 analysis of ‘Doris Lessing and the Realist Tradition’, Jeanette King argues that Mary Turner’s ‘horror of human physicality’, ‘aroused so intensely by the sight’ of natives, gradually changes, over the course of the novel, ‘into the kind of fascination she feels when she

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watches Moses washing’ (12). I would argue, somewhat differently, that the fascination is always already there, alongside the revulsion; like the two sides of a sheet of paper, the revulsion and attraction are inseparable.4 This is because abjection concerns, in the words of Kristeva again, ‘an elsewhere as tempting as it is condemned’ (1). Hence, even in her early encounter with Moses, in which she viciously whips him across the face for the insolence that she perceives from him out in the field, we are told, in a passage that is significantly focalized through Mary herself, that Moses was ‘a great hulk of a man, taller than any of the others, magnificently built, with nothing but an old sack round his waist’ (119). Horror and fascination are thus united, even in this initial encounter, as Mary perceives the magnificence of Moses’s body. Furthermore, this passage falls at the end of chapter 7, preceding a chapter that begins with the narrator’s observation that Mary, ‘needed a man stronger than herself’ (127). Once he has been promoted to houseboy, Moses eventually, in a sense, ‘becomes her master’, according to Paul Schlueter, in his landmark 1969 study of Lessing’s work (12). I would argue, from a slightly different angle, that Moses can be understood as gradually becoming not so much her master as her mother, in his progressively evident, firm attentiveness to her needs and his punishment of her transgressions. Significantly, within Kristeva’s theory, abjection has its roots in infantile experience, as the infant begins to differentiate itself from that which will only later be understood as the maternal. Abjection involves, in the words of philosopher Tina Chanter, ‘the separation of the subject (who is not yet a subject) from the mother (who is not yet the mother). For we are dealing with a point at which there is as yet no “secure differentiation between subject and object”’ (155). Since abjection is initiated before the child’s entry into the symbolic order of language, during the period that Kristeva associates with undifferentiated pulsations, rhythms and connection with the mother – a period that she designates ‘the semiotic’, abjection is aligned by Kristeva with the female. Experiences of abjection, throughout life, carry us back, uncannily, to that early, infantile experience of separation from the maternal body, a separation that can never be complete enough – hence the underlining of familiarity in experiences of abjection to which I earlier referred, and hence their simultaneous attraction. ‘The abject confronts us’, Kristeva tells us, ‘with our earliest attempts to release the hold of maternal entity even before ex-isting outside of her. . . . It is a violent, clumsy breaking away, with the constant risk of falling back under the sway of a power as securing as it is stifling’ (13).

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In keeping with this linkage between abjection and the maternal, at the very centre of The Grass is Singing, the narrator points out that surpassing the horror of the indigenous male body is the nadir of revulsion that Mary experiences in relation to the lactating bodies of African women. The most repugnant manifestation of corporeality, in Mary Turner’s view, is maternal nursing, which is indelibly associated with the dark-skinned Rhodesian native women whom she watches from a distance. Using Kristeva’s terminology, we can say that Mary is indeed haunted by ‘a vortex of summons and repulsion’, in relation to the abjected breast, which leaves her, to borrow Kristeva’s word, ‘beside’ herself (1). Mary thus, in a sense, stages the following scenario, by refusing to open her store for the native workers until a queue of women has formed; she then voyeuristically surveys the result: If she disliked native men, she loathed the women. She hated the exposed fleshiness of them, their soft brown bodies and soft bashful faces that were also insolent and inquisitive, and their chattering voices that held a brazen, fleshy undertone. She could not bear to see them sitting there on the grass, their legs tucked under them in that traditional timeless pose, as peaceful and uncaring as if it did not matter whether the store was opened, or whether it remained shut all day and they would have to return tomorrow. Above all, she hated the way they suckled their babies, with their breasts hanging down for everyone to see; there was something in their calm satisfied maternity that made her blood boil. ‘Their babies hanging on to them like leeches,’ she said to herself shuddering, for she thought with horror of suckling a child. The idea of a child’s lips on her breasts made her feel quite sick; at the thought of it she would involuntarily clasp her hands over her breasts, as if protecting them from a violation. (94–5) By strictly limiting her store schedule and thereby forcing the local women to wait for her with their babies, Mary has created her own scene of abjection, albeit in order to condemn it. She has, herself, produced this tableau, in which ‘fleshy’ voices chatter an incomprehensible language to her ears, and maternal and infantile bodies are visibly connected, skin-to-skin, with breast milk flowing between them. As in the case of Moses, here too the revulsion that Mary experiences circulates around both language and the body. While we are told that she ‘could not bear to see them’, it is she herself who has made it inevitable that she does in fact see them. Mary is as drawn to these lactating maternal bodies, just as she is horrified by them.5

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In Powers of Horror, Kristeva analyses abjection on the level of individual identity, and yet a number of other theorists have extended her ideas, to consider abjection on a broader social, cultural plane. Sara Ahmed develops the Kristevan exploration of the abject into an examination of the relation between the subject and the collective, the subject and the nation, in her 2005 essay, ‘The Skin of the Community: Affect and Boundary Formation’.6 Kristeva herself has made the point that national identities have everything to do with individual identities. But Ahmed asks us to think about the relationship between subject and community not as a metaphoric correspondence, whereby, for instance, nation equals subject but, instead, as a metonymic correspondence, ‘involving’, as she says, ‘proximity or contact between bodies’. Ahmed argues that ‘it is how bodies come into contact with other bodies that allows the nation as a collective body to emerge’. From a perspective that resonates in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, she makes the point that ‘what separates us from others also connects us to others’ (101) and, further, ‘that objects come to matter not simply as standins, but rather in the very contact and proximity between objects’ (103). Moses’s first physical touch, so shocking to Mary, can thus be seen as skin-to-skin contact that breaches a fundamental social boundary, calling Mary’s autonomous, fortified identity, as a member of the white ruling class, into question, as she is, in a sense, polluted by that touch. The touch of the African man threatens Mary’s social integrity. Not only Mary’s identity but the identity of the entire colonial society in which she lives is itself subtly transformed with each instance of such contact between races. The most threatening manifestation of this, miscegenation, is what drives the intense cultural anxiety to curtail the proliferation of contact by fortifying social boundaries.7 It is precisely this anxiety that leads, at the novel’s opening, to the repudiation of Mary’s dead body by the men investigating her murder. Since she is suspected of an inappropriate relationship with her native servant, Moses, her corpse is doubly contaminated. In a similar way, the proximity of the nursing African mothers and babies can be understood as polluting Mary as well, via the eyes through which she watches their maternal interconnectivity. Through her voyeurism, she has made intimate contact with their maternal intimacy; she has been touched by them, just as she has been touched by Moses. I would like to extend even further these notions of the abject and the community in relation to this central breastfeeding scene. The maternal nursing that Mary Turner observes can be understood as defining precarious boundaries on both a physical, material level and a cultural level, in terms of the colonial African society of the characters. On the material

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level, breastfeeding signifies the breach of boundaries defining individuals: two bodies connect in the breastfeeding exchange, thereby blurring the outlines of physical autonomy. Also on a material level, maternal nursing signifies the breach of a boundary between exterior and interior of the body, as the fluid produced within the breast passes out of the interior of the woman’s body through her nipple into the world external to her, then re-enters another body, that of the child. Breastfeeding thus violates the conceptual boundaries between inside and outside, at the same time that it threatens those between self and other. On a broader social level, maternal nursing also clearly signifies the dividing line between cultures and races. It is designated by Lessing as that which the native women do practice and that which the colonizing, white, British women emphatically do not practice. Thus, at the conclusion of the long passage quoted above, we are told, in relation to Mary, that, [S]ince so many white women are like her, turning with relief to the bottle, she was in good company, and did not think of herself, but rather of these black women, as strange; they were alien and primitive creatures with ugly desires she could not bear to think about. (95) Breastfeeding is what simultaneously defines and imperils the boundary between races here. It is thus doubly abject, as that which bears the potential to disrupt both individual autonomy and – simultaneously – cultural integrity, upon which the social fabric is dependent. Lessing further signals some of this with Mary’s confession to Tony Marston, in the concluding pages of the novel: ‘“Of course, I am ill,” she said confidingly, addressing the Englishman. “I’ve always been ill, ever since I can remember. I am ill here.” She pointed to her chest’ (203). Lessing thus indicates that Mary’s problems are connected to what we think of as the centre of her being, where her breasts reside. At the end of the novel, Mary Turner has moved on from her flirtations with the abject to becoming what she already was from the beginning of the narrative: a corpse. About the corpse, Kristeva says, [T]he corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. It is no longer I who expel, ‘I’ is expelled. The border has become an object . . . I behold the breaking down of a world that has erased its borders: fainting away. The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one

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does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us. (3–4) Mary Turner’s corpse has beckoned us from the first page of Lessing’s novel, drawing us on through the narrative to the point of its origin, at the end. This circular structure of The Grass is Singing, a standard of the murdermystery genre, can thus be seen, from a Kristevan perspective, as mirroring the processes of abjection, initiated as it is with the nadir of revulsion, the corpse, by which we are simultaneously attracted and lured on. However, just before Mary crosses that ultimate boundary between life and death and becomes a corpse, she has an experience that reads as the antithesis of the revulsion of abjection. In an extended passage that stands out in a striking way from the timbre of the rest of the novel, Mary experiences a ‘marvellous moment of peace and forgiveness . . . [a] wonderful, rooted joy’ (192). In this moment of blissful ecstasy, Mary feels securely enclosed for the first time in the narrative. We are thus told that ‘[s]he was inside a bubble of fresh light and colour, of brilliant sound and birdsong’ (192). Mary thus suddenly finds herself in what can be understood as a uterine space, without words, surrounded by a cascade of sounds and colours, such that, we are told: ‘[s]he could have wept with release and lighthearted joy’ (192). This is the happiest that we have ever seen Mary. She has achieved the same satisfaction that she had recognized and reviled in the scene of maternal nursing outside of her store. Mary arrives at this moment of joy through the gradual process of letting go of her sanity, as the novel progresses, as more and more conceptual boundaries dissolve for Mary, as she crosses the lines and breaks the unwritten laws of her society. The most overt component of her social breach is, of course, the ambiguous, unbounded relationship that she develops with Moses. However, I would argue that this is simply one component of something larger, that what Lessing has given us, in The Grass is Singing, is a narrative of Mary’s movement out of the symbolic order of language, out of what psychoanalytic theorists call the Law of the Father, and, finally, all of the way back into the semiotic realm of undifferentiated pulsations, rhythms and connection with the maternal that Kristeva postulates, and in which distinctions of skin colour are meaningless. As a part of her journey to this final destination, Mary has gradually acquiesced to Moses’s paradoxically maternal care of her: feeding her, putting her to bed, presenting her with small gifts, catching her when she falls, and, ultimately, even dressing her each day.

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Finally, in the epiphanous moments before her death, when she unexpectedly sees the world as an infant might, as: ‘a miracle of colour, and all for her, all for her!’, Mary Turner has joyfully turned back entirely to the semiotic. Lessing indicates this through the use of monosyllabic, childlike syntax and repetition, the articulation of an egomaniacal possessiveness, and the suggestion of a childlike sense of wonder, all of which distinguish her protagonist’s regressive experience. Mary Turner has ultimately renounced abjection, instead returning to and accepting her infantile origins, just as the narrative has returned to its starting place, with the mysterious, unaccountable corpse. As the novel comes back, full circle, to its starting point, Mary is, in a sense, born into her death, as she returns to the maternal body of the earth that has always beckoned her and which she was able to recognize only obliquely in those abject lactating African women, and even less so in herself. Lessing’s first novel is thus a complex exploration of multiple, interrelated cultural and psychological boundaries, as these are anxiously enforced and progressively transgressed. The most apparent of these transgressions is Mary’s cross-racial contact with Moses, beginning with the first shocking tactile encounter, and perpetually carrying with it the profound social threat of miscegenation, as the relationship evolves over the course of the narrative. However, this breach of cultural boundaries is linked to another: the penetrative, skin-to-skin contact of breastfeeding, which, among other things, pollutes Mary through its visibility. The evocation of the nadir of the abject in this scene of maternal nursing, an abject that, according to Kristevan theory, emerges in relation to the mother’s body, anticipates Mary’s own return to infancy, first through her progressive acceptance of Moses’s maternal care and finally through her absorption into the semiotic, in the moments before her death. The rigid enforcement of cultural boundaries, within the racist, patriarchal society of Southern Rhodesia of the mid-twentieth century, ultimately leads to the renunciation of patriarchy by Lessing’s protagonist. Mary Turner rejects the symbolic order in favour of the abject; an abject that has been re-membered as the comforting breast of a mother, welcoming Mary, horrifically, to her death.

Notes 1

In The Novels of Doris Lessing, of 1969, Paul Schlueter points out that, ‘the book was overwhelmingly well received by both the critics and the public, and it went

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through seven reprintings within five months’ (7). However, Claire Sprague and Virginia Tiger, in their Introduction to the 1986 anthology Critical Essays on Doris Lessing, add that, ‘[S]ince that initial generous reception, critics have paid little attention to The Grass Is Singing’, considering it merely ‘a sociological study of racism fused to a psychological study of breakdown’ (4). That relative neglect continues to the present day, although Lessing’s 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature will hopefully inspire a reconsideration of this first publication. I would like to thank Paul Schleuter, Susan Watkins and Alice Ridout for their excellent comments on this essay. See Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible, and particularly his chapter on ‘The Intertwining – The Chiasm’. As part of an exploration of the distinguishing qualities of the visual and the tactile fields, Merleau-Ponty asks, ‘[W]here are we to put the limit between the body and the world, since the world is flesh?’ (138). He explicates as follows: [W]hile each monocular vision, each touching with one sole hand has its own visible, its tactile, each is bound to every other vision, to every other touch; it is bound in such a way as to make up with them the experience of one sole body before one sole world, through a possibility for reversion, reconversion of its language into theirs, transfer, and reversal, according to which the little private world of each is not just juxtaposed to the world of all the others, but surrounded by it, levied off from it, and all together are a Sentient in general before a Sensible in general. (142)

3

4

5

6

7

Lessing emigrated from Southern Rhodesia to Britain in 1949, at the age of 30; Julia Kristeva emigrated to France from Bulgaria in 1966, at the age of 25. The reflexivity of the concept of chiasmus would be another appropriate metaphor here. In the penultimate section of Doris Lessing’s influential feminist classic of 1962, The Golden Notebook, Anna Wulf unexpectedly finds herself struggling with what she describes as a ‘feeling of being alien to my own body’ (532). The self-disgust that she suddenly observes in herself is notably focused on her breasts and, specifically, their potential to lactate. She thus confesses: ‘when I saw my breasts all I could think of was how they were when they were full of milk, and instead of this being pleasurable, it was revolting’ (532). However, as I demonstrate here, Lessing’s engagement with maternal nursing dates even further back, to her first novel, of 1950, The Grass is Singing, in which the lactating African breast is designated as the site of utter revulsion. The notion of the abject and the theorization of abjection are central to the work of Kristeva and have produced a range of further works by other thinkers. One relatively recent example of this is the 2005 publication of collected essays, Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva’s Polis, which ‘privilege[s] Kristeva’s work on abjection’, as Maria Margaroni points out, in a 2007 Signs article reviewing the recent work on and by Kristeva. Sarah Ahmed’s essay appears in this collection of essays. For an excellent analysis of cultural attitudes towards miscegenation and desire, see Robert Young’s 1995 Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race.

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Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. ‘The Skin of the Community: Affect and Boundary Formation’. Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva’s Polis. Eds. Tina Chanter and Ewa Płonowska Ziarek. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. pp. 95–111. Chanter, Tina. ‘The Exoticization and Universalization of the Fetish, and the Naturalization of the Phallus: Abject Objections’. Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva’s Polis. Eds. Tina Chanter and Ewa Płonowska Ziarek. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. pp. 149–79. Gamble, Sarah. ed. The Routledge Critical Dictionary of Feminism and Postfeminism. Cambridge: Routledge, 1999. Hanson, Clare. ‘Doris Lessing in Pursuit of the English, or, No Small Personal Voice’. In Pursuit of Doris Lessing: Nine Nations Reading. Ed. Claire Sprague. London: Macmillan, 1990. pp. 61–73. King, Jeannette. Doris Lessing. London: Edward Arnold, 1989. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Published originally as Pouvoirs de l’horreur. 1980. Éditions du Seuil. Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook. 1962. London: HarperCollins, 1994. — The Grass is Singing. 1950. London: HarperCollins, 1994. Margaroni, Maria. ‘Recent Work on and by Julia Kristeva: Toward a Psychoanalytic Social Theory’. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 32: 3 (2007), 793–808. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. ‘The Intertwining – The Chiasm’. In The Visible and the Invisible. 1964. Ed. Claude Lefort. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University, 1968. pp. 130–55. Schlueter, Paul. The Novels of Doris Lessing. 1969. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973. Young, Robert. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London and New York: Routledge, 1995.

Chapter 2

Inside and Outside Colonial Spaces: Border Crossings in Doris Lessing’s African Stories Pat Louw University of Zululand, South Africa

The cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan makes a distinction between ‘space’ and ‘place’ in his Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. He says, ‘What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value’ (6). He gives the example of a neighbourhood being ‘at first a confusion of images to the new resident; it is blurred space “out there.” Learning to know the neighborhood requires the identification of significant localities, such as street corners and architectural landmarks, within the neighborhood space’ (17–18). Using Tuan’s framework, we can view the system of colonialism as it is reflected in Doris Lessing’s African Stories as a process of place-making, from the point of view of the settlers. At first the new country might seem to them ‘a blur of images’, but as they begin to recognize landmarks, the alien space becomes place for them. It is however a much more intense process than the one of simply being in a new neighbourhood. Settlers confront a different world. Numerous kinds of landmarks in addition to the geographical have to be found for the settler to perceive African space as place. Although Tuan’s notion of ‘place-making’ is useful in the settler context, it could be somewhat restrictive in the sense that the term space would not be used for areas that are known and valued. It would be reserved for areas that have not become known or meaningful such as the wild bush. I would prefer to specify different types of spaces, such as domestic space and wild space or African space, rather than using only place to describe the domestic environment. In particular I will be using the spatial metaphor of ‘inside’ to denote the enclosed, domesticated space of the settler and the world beyond the settler’s will be referred to as ‘outside’ or as African space. This will encompass both the wild natural environment and traditional African homesteads.

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Some critics have compared Lessing’s representation of African space to Conrad’s in Heart of Darkness. According to Veronica Bowker, A non-African such as Conrad in Heart of Darkness who uses African space as a foil in order to strengthen (sic) the boundaries of his own culture, writes an ‘outside of Africa’ text; whereas a non-African (in the sense of being European) such as Doris Lessing in The Grass is Singing who does not use African space to emphasize her own cultural boundaries, but investigates the very nature of boundaries, the nature of the worlds which they enclose and what happens when different kinds of worlds (in this case white Southern African and African) are placed in confrontation in Africa, writes an ‘out of Africa’ text. (61–2) I propose to focus on the spatiality in Lessing’s African Stories in order to illustrate how she uses the crossing of boundaries in colonial space to construct complex subjectivities. However, I wish to acknowledge the problems inherent in too great a reliance on the dimension of space to the detriment of time. In the words of May and Thrift, ‘in place of an earlier and debilitating historicism it may be that social theory is moving towards a creeping – and just as debilitating – “spatial imperialism”’(2). They point out the limitations of the dualism inherent in keeping these dimensions separate and to remedy this they have introduced the term TimeSpace to emphasize the interdependency of these two dimensions: ‘time is irrecoverably bound up with the spatial constitution of society’ (3). My understanding of TimeSpace is that it is an attempt to bring the two dimensions back into equilibrium and to give them equal importance with regard to the construction of subjectivity. In the colonial context it holds possibilities as a way of describing or representing the ways in which settlers work with both space and time simultaneously. This is connected to their sense of belonging and their sense of displacement.

Incomplete Borders The drawing up of boundaries and enclosing domestic spaces is an essential part of the place-making process. In the African Stories boundaries are drawn up, barriers erected, transitions made and resisted as the African landscape is overlaid with new colonial boundaries. The most pressing occupation of the settler was to lay claim to the land by erecting fences. Victoria Rosner reports that settlers were given financial incentives from the Imperial Land Bank for fencing their properties in good time. She says, ‘the determining

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factor of the British settler’s relationship to the land was thus his ability to erect a boundary, to create a division that separated “mine” from “not mine”’ (‘Home’ 69). However, these boundaries were not always clear. In trying to separate the enclosed, domestic space from the outside space, settlers found that they had to go through a period of transition where it was not possible to build a house that would have an uninterrupted exterior border. In the early days of settler housing there were not sufficient building materials or expertise to construct houses in the style of the houses in England. Doris Lessing writes in her autobiography that the first settler houses were similar to African houses: ‘early settler houses were often half a dozen thatched huts, or brick or pole-and-mud, sometimes joined together by pergolas’ (Under 56). Living in a number of separate domestic spaces probably gave rise to a sense of insecurity in the settlers. Their instinct was to bring everything under one roof and to create a building which resembled a fortress to stave off threats from the unknown land. Rosner states that for Africans, ‘the outside space was considered part of the dwelling place’ but ‘for the colonists the distinction between inside and outside was paramount’ (‘Home’ 67). One way in which settlers dealt with the threat of the unknown outside space was to turn it into a picture. Thus we note that the main difference between settler houses and African houses was that the settlers always had windows but the huts had none. By framing the landscape in a view from a window, the settler makes the wilderness of the African bush less frightening, as it can be appreciated aesthetically from the safety of the domestic interior. The settler’s attitude towards the African landscape was strongly influenced by the imperialist discourse which involved the colonizers bringing civilization to Africa. Rosner quotes from a guidebook for prospective settlers: ‘Our imperial adventures in the world’s waste places, the redemption of these waste places that they might come into line and aid the growth of civilization, are all the work of the engineer’ (‘Home’ 64).These ‘waste spaces’ were to be kept out of the domestic areas and especially away from the females, but were seen as areas to be exploited by mining or agriculture by the (male) settlers. In this way the spatial divisions brought with them gendered roles.

Keeping the Outside Out In order to guard the borders between the settler’s enclosed realm and that of the wild African space, the settlers constructed barriers. However these

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barriers sometimes failed to keep the wildness out. Doris Lessing’s representation of the African landscape depends on how she sees these ‘waste spaces’. Anthony Chennells emphasizes the difference between the attitudes to the land of the white settlers and the black people. He says, ‘What Africans saw as places crowded with ancestral associations and spiritual presences, the whites saw as empty spaces waiting to be shaped by their creative will. What to blacks was structured space was to the whites wilderness’ (‘Reading’ 25). The myth of the empty land is one of the dominant settler myths, used to justify colonialism. As Eva Hunter puts it, ‘The notion that the land was empty, and even when not entirely empty in need of “taming,” buttressed the self-righteousness of the white colonizers of southern Africa’ (35). Lessing has a complex attitude to the idea of the ‘empty’ land. The title of the first volume of her African Stories – This Was the Old Chief’s Country – indicates that she is well aware that the land had been occupied before the coming of the settlers. The spiritual presences in ancient Africa are often strongly felt in her narratives. In Going Home during the building of her family home on the farm, a grave of tribal chiefs was uncovered (39). The workers had obviously blundered onto a sacred site but had not been aware of it. However, in spite of the awareness of these sacred sites and spiritual presences, Lessing speaks appreciatively of the sense of empty space in Africa. She says, ‘I am not sure whether this passion for emptiness, for space, only has meaning in relation to Europe. Africa is scattered all over with white men who push out and away from cities and people, to remote farms and outposts, seeking solitude’ (Going 11). Anthony Chennells comments on Lessing’s attitude to the myth of the empty land: ‘She also seems, to an extent, to have identified with settlers who saw in the empty land an opportunity for self-realization and for the free development of personality, impossible to achieve in England or even in Rhodesia’s towns’ (‘Doris’ 4). The significance of this comment is that it links the formation of identity with the landscape. Lessing makes a similar comment when relating a conversation she has on her flight to Africa in Going Home: ‘For a moment we shared the understanding of people who have been made by the same landscape’ (11). The connection between the landscape and her ‘being’ is contained in these words. The construction of landscape is also something which is not fixed but is dependent on the perception of the writer. Simon Schama writes: ‘Landscape is the work of the mind, its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock’ (6). He maintains that both children and adults view nature through a frame of complicated ‘memories, myths and meanings’ (6). The implication is that landscape is an expression of

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our cultural identity. James Tyner sees landscape functioning as a medium through which subjectivity can be constituted. He says, ‘It is a matter of who we are through a concern of where we are’ (261). The relationship between landscape and the self is therefore a complex one, involving continual interaction between the physical environment and the self. Lessing’s representation of landscape involves her childhood memories, her experiences and her underlying philosophical assumptions. These assumptions are pointed out by Anthony Chennells who argues that Lessing explores contradictory themes in imperialist discourse in her African Stories: ‘Within the stories there is a continual tension between a romantic response to the African bush and the capitalism of the settlers which sought to transform it into profitable settlements, mining or agricultural land (‘Reading’ 25). Writing in postindependence Zimbabwe, he explains that romantic anti-capitalism is an alien concept for black Zimbabweans. They are accustomed to opposing capitalism with socialism within a nationalist framework. However, Lessing’s love of the veld may be intensified by her reading of the Romantic poets and her complex response to the pastoral tradition. Oliver Buckton maintains that Lessing is offering an anti-pastoral critique in her first novel, The Grass is Singing. He says that her critique is ‘not of nature as such, but rather of the pastoral tradition that embodies an idealized and unrealistic response to landscape and rural life’ (8). Lessing’s debt to Olive Schreiner (termed by J M Coetzee ‘the great antipastoral writer in South Africa’ [4]) is well known. Coetzee goes on to argue that Schreiner’s farm has two elements: The farm is also a place of human habitation, and indeed so human in its bigotry, hypocrisy, and idleness that all that redeems it from being an African town in miniature is its setting in nature. The farm thus has two aspects: nature and town. These aspects merely coexist. They form no synthesis. (64) In Coetzee’s analysis, the veld has a redemptive effect on the farm but in the end cannot offer an integrated existence on it (65). Schreiner’s veld is constructed as empty and inhospitable and yet it has positive aspects to it. The veld, or untamed nature is therefore an ambivalent space and the farm is not simply placed in opposition to the town but it contains urban elements within it. Anthony Chennells makes a similar point to Coetzee’s in relation to the value of the veld in Lessing’s African writing: Almost invariably in Lessing’s stories, the narratives reject the towns with their African townships and suburban sprawl and the space around the

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successful farms and mines which has pushed back the wilderness. If there is inspiration in this country, it lies not in the towns and farms but in the vastness of the veld beyond them. (‘Reading’ 26) Chennells highlights the crucial distinction between the wilderness areas and the tamed or cultivated zones of the African farm. While the concept of the pastoral in Europe calls to mind a patterned and cultivated landscape (‘plotted and pieced’ in Hopkins’s terms [748]), in Africa the wild veld and bush could form a large percentage of a farm. Lessing expresses this point in Martha Quest: In the literature that was her tradition, the word farm evokes an image of something orderly, compact, cultivated; a neat farmhouse in a pattern of fields. Martha looked over a mile or so of bush to a strip of pink ploughed land; and then the bush, dark green and somber, climbed a ridge to another patch of exposed earth, this time a clayish yellow; and then, stretched to a line of blue kopjes. The fields were a timid intrusion on a landscape hardly marked by man. (8) Thus it is important to note that there are many different spatial zones making up the African landscape which hold different meanings for the beholders. When the borders between these zones are crossed there are corresponding changes in the constitution of the self. I hope to show that Lessing conveys a much more complex variety of perspectives on landscape and the pastoral tradition in the early short stories, partly encouraged by the flexibility of the short story genre. Although there are aspects of the short stories which accord very well with the anti-pastoral tradition, I hope to demonstrate that Lessing goes beyond the European binary of the pastoral and anti-pastoral position to a more complex view of the space which is occupied by the human beings in a colonial context, a view that has been characterized by Terry Gifford as ‘post-pastoral’ (77–87). The first border crossing I will discuss is that between the house and the bush. In Going Home Lessing tells an amusing story about her childhood home: ‘A young tree used to shoot up under my bed every wet season’ (53). It grew up through a crack in the linoleum and although she liked the idea of having a tree growing in her room, her mother insisted on chopping it down whereupon it came up in a different spot the following season. Victoria Rosner observes that Lessing differs markedly from her mother who ‘was deeply committed to maintaining the structural integrity of the house, preserving a barrier against the bush’ (‘Home’ 74).

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An important example of ‘place-making’ in the settler world is the making of gardens. The garden can be seen as a barrier between the wild natural environment and the tamed vegetation of the formal garden. Robert Balfour expresses it as a ‘European translation of an alien space’ (8). In ‘Flavours of Exile’ (Sun 124–33), the border between the vegetable garden and the wild space beyond becomes blurred as we read about the invasion of Cape gooseberry bushes: ‘At last, the spaces in the bush where the old beds had been were seeded by wild or vagrant plants, and we children played there. Someone must have thrown away gooseberries, for soon the low-spreading bushes covered the earth’ (Sun 125).This space becomes a place of harmony and playfulness for the young girl narrator, and by implication for Lessing, the retrospective narrator. It is one of the points of conflict between the narrator and her mother that they do not agree on the value of these plants. For the mother, they aren’t real gooseberries as they are not English. One could say that the wild gooseberry plants disrupt the mother’s attempt at place-making in Africa. The mother in this story occupies a number of different spaces simultaneously in her mind. She longs for the gardens of England and of Persia where she lived in previous years. She attempts to bring the past into the present, thus attempting to occupy different times simultaneously: the time when she was a girl, growing up in England; the time when she lived in Persia as a colonial wife; and the time in Africa. In fact, she tries to erase present time with past time. Space and time are closely interwoven in the expression of her subjectivity. In ‘The De Wets come to Kloof Grange’ (Chief 75–103) there is a similar disruption of place-making by the wildness crossing the borders of the garden into the tamed, domesticated space of the garden. Mrs Gale, the farmer’s wife, attempts to replicate the gardens of England by creating a garden with roses, lawns and fountains. She too attempts to superimpose the domestic space of England onto her immediate surroundings. To some extent she is successful in this, but she cannot keep out the strong odour of vegetation from the steamy river valley below her garden. The peace and tranquillity which Mrs Gale constructs for herself in relation to this garden is also disrupted by the intrusion of Mrs De Wet, a young Afrikaner woman. This woman is not interested in gardens. She comes from a different background and says, ‘My mother was always too busy having kids to have time for gardens’ (93). When Mrs Gale takes her to admire the view of the mountains, thereby offering her the best remedy she knows of for the pain of loneliness, Mrs De Wet leans over the gulf and exclaims, ‘There’s my river’ (93), much to Mrs Gale’s horror. Mrs De Wet is more at home in the natural environment and immerses herself in it, going down to the river and

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dangling her legs in the water. Their different attitudes towards the African landscape indicate a deep difference within their identity which involves physicality. Mrs Gale recoils from physical contact, either with her husband or with the young girl. She stiffly maintains this border between herself and another human being, whereas the girl relates to people and the environment in a physical way. Their ethnic differences, not belonging to the same language group, are not as important as the basic difference in identity construction with regard to the African landscape. Afrikaans-speaking people occupy a somewhat ambivalent position in the colonial spaces of Lessing’s stories. They seem to cross the borders between the ‘inside’ domestic spaces and the African space more freely than their English counterparts. In a sense they are both colonizers and colonized, having been colonized by the British in South Africa.They also disrupt the constructed ‘places’ of domestic safety such as Mrs Gale’s garden by bringing in a sense of wildness and intrepid adventure which destabilizes the precarious balance created by the domesticated environment of house and garden. There is one occasion during which Mrs Gale crosses the border of her enclosed garden into the wild landscape. It is one evening before the De Wets arrive when she walks over to inspect the vacant house where they are to live. Although she takes this path often during the day, it is unfamiliar and strange at night: At the gate, under the hanging white trumpets of moonflower she paused, and lingered for a while, looking over the space of empty veld between her and the other house. She did not like going outside her garden at night. She was not afraid of natives, no: she had contempt for women who were afraid, for she regarded Africans as rather pathetic children, and was very kind to them. She did not know what made her afraid. Therefore she took a deep breath, compressed her lips, and stepped carefully through the gate, shutting it behind her with a click. (80) Apart from the humorous way in which Lessing points out the paternalism of Mrs Gale’s attitude towards the ‘natives’, and her sense of superiority towards other women, there is a very clear instance of the zoning of landscape in this incident. Mrs Gale leaves the safe base, the buffer zone, with reluctance, especially at the sight of the ‘space of empty veld’ between her and the other house. It is as if she has to run the gauntlet of exposure to wilderness under the transforming light of the night sky. Mrs Gale prefers the familiar world of her fixed habits. Indeed the walk between the houses

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during the day time is part of her daily ‘constitutional’. But at night it arouses an unexplained fear to Mrs Gale: the fear of one who has crossed the border from the known to the unknown and is destabilized by the uncertainty this brings.

Keeping the Inside In While the wildness of the African environment crosses borders to penetrate domestic spaces of settler society, there is also the opposite movement from the enclosed space to the outside. During Lessing’s childhood, she often broke through the domestic barrier to explore the wild areas of veld and bush. Rosner describes this rebellion: Figuring her adolescent rebellion as an ‘emigration’, a journey out of the mother-country to unknown parts, Lessing illustrates the unexpected reciprocity of maternity and colonialism, a relationship most clearly played out in border skirmishes fought by mother and daughter across the all-important boundary between house and bush. (‘Geography’ 12) Lessing’s struggle for independence from her mother is a social and emotional issue and yet it has a territorial dimension as it ‘plays out’ over the border ‘between house and bush’. While the bush is the father’s domain, the house is clearly the mother’s. It includes the veranda, the garden and the farmyard; that interstitial space between the house and the bush. The story ‘Traitors’ (Sun 83–92) issues from the tension between these gendered spaces. The two little girls in the story venture out from the domain of the house and the yard to the unknown, wild area of the farm in spite of their mother’s disapproval. This action forms their initial treachery to the cause of women as they explore the male domain. Lessing gives a sense of their complete immersion in this ‘alien’ or wild, unknown world by describing their perspective: When we had tired of our familiar acre we explored the rest of the farm: but this particular stretch of bush was avoided. Sometimes we stood at its edge, and peered in at the tangled granite outcrops and great ant-heaps curtained with Christmas fern. Sometimes we pushed our way a few feet, till the grass closed behind us, leaving overhead a small space of blue. Then we lost our heads and ran back again. (83)

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Initially the girls occupy a threshold space as they stand on the edge of the familiar, looking on to the unknown. When they make the transition and move into that space, they are completely cut off from the familiar, and the contraction of the sky to ‘a small space of blue’ takes the reader down to grass roots level, to the perspective of a small child looking upward. This is the opposite of the typical imperialist stance of the colonist surveying his land, standing on a promontory, thus giving a momentary reversal of the colonial stereotype. Their identity is similarly poised on the threshold of adulthood. Lessing depicts the way in which the process of identity formation is fostered by the wild landscape as it gives the girls an opportunity to experiment with both male and female roles. They imitate the role of the male adventurer by exploring the natural environment but they also re-enact the role of the mother by making an imaginary home in the bush on the site of an old ruined house. In this way they cross the border between gendered spaces in an attempt to balance the male and female imperatives in their lives (McCormick 13). The place-making of the children in the bush on the site of the old ruined house is disrupted, however, by a black woman who suddenly appears out of the bush and stands watching them as they imitate Mr Thompson: We waited for her to go, drawing together; but she came close and stared in a way that made us afraid. She was old and fat, and she wore a red print dress from the store. She said in a soft, wheedling voice: ‘When is Boss Thompson coming back?’ ‘Go away!’ we shouted. And then she began to laugh. She sauntered off into the bush, swinging her hips and looking back over her shoulder and laughing. (86–7) The appearance of this woman has a powerful effect on the little girls. Having first crossed the border between the domestic and the wild spaces, they now are confronted with a different border: the border between childhood and adulthood. In the story we read, ‘That laugh, that slow, insulting stare had meant something outside our knowledge and experience’ (87). By crossing the border into the unknown geographical terrain they find that they have discovered one of the hidden secrets of the adult world: the illicit relationships between white men and black women. In her physical movements the woman suggests the sexual nature of her relationship with Thompson. By appearing and almost laying claim to the site of the old ruined house that she apparently shared with Mr Thompson she is in a

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sense crossing the border of both time and space. She is referring back to the time when she shared his domestic space with him. It is as if she is taking back colonial space and her laughter and relaxed movements show that she is equally at home in the bush and is in control of the situation, unlike Mr Thomson’s present wife who is very threatened by the house in the bush and her husband’s previous life before he married her. The wild landscape becomes for the girls a space of resistance when they are called upon to show Mrs Thompson, a woman they dislike, their secret place in the bush. Being under the authority of their parents, they have to accede to the demand but because of their knowledge of the wild area, they resist the invasion of ‘their’ space by deliberately taking Mrs Thompson the most difficult way. The narrator seems to have no mercy in ensuring the discomfort of her victim: I made Mrs Thompson climb over the rocks, push through grass, bend under bushes. I made her scramble down the gully so that she fell on her knees on the sharp pebbles and the dust. I walked her so fast, finally, in a wide circle through the thorn trees that I could hear her panting behind me. (90) The landscape in this instance is allowing a reversal in the normal power relations between children and adults. The girls are insiders in this outdoor space and their identity at this moment is inscribed with a power that the adult woman lacks. However, emotional pressure is brought to bear on them at the end of the narrative to return to the female domain. There seems to be a window period where they have shifting identities in relation to landscape until they are finally locked into the role which society demands of them. In this story Lessing seems to be demonstrating the power of social norms and conventions as well as the manipulative power of the mother to enforce those conventions. However the empowerment afforded the children by the wild African bush offers a kernel of hope of future possibilities of expanding women’s roles in that society. The narrative situation of a young girl venturing out beyond the home is developed in a more complex way in ‘The Old Chief Mshlanga’ (Chief 13–34). The girl crosses numerous borders, including the territorial, social and metaphorical. Her social identity and her construction of landscape are interwoven throughout the story. At first the girl’s interaction with the African landscape is highly coloured by her cultural constructions, making her blind to the surrounding African landscape. She lives in a fairytale world of European fantasy and sees snowy forests and northern witches,

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even when she is in the middle of a summer maize field in Africa. It is only after she has a chance meeting with old Chief Mslanga as he walks through her father’s farm that she begins to see the African landscape and relate to it directly: ‘slowly that other landscape in my mind faded, and my feet struck directly on the African soil, and I saw the shapes of tree and hill clearly’ (17). This meeting with the chief constitutes a crucial border crossing for the young girl. It is a social border as it is the first time she speaks to an African man who is not employed by her father and who has the pride and dignity of a chief. This meeting repositions her in relation to the black people of the country and leads her to reflect critically on her identity as a colonizer. Ironically, she had had the opportunity of finding out about the chief before this as his son worked for them as a servant, but it was only when she moved beyond the border of the domestic space with its prescribed colonial roles that she could experience a different kind of interaction with both the people and the land. A second border crossing occurs in the story when the girl attempts to visit the area where the old chief lives. This time she goes beyond the border of her father’s farm to a new part of the country: I followed unfamiliar paths past kopjes that till now had been part of the jagged horizon, hazed with distance. This was Government land, which had never been cultivated by white men; at first I could not understand why it was that it appeared, in merely crossing the boundary, I had entered a completely fresh type of landscape. (19) Her father’s farm is overgrazed and exploited, but this landscape gives her a glimpse of the precolonial times. In spite of its beauty and untouched Edenic quality, it arouses in her a feeling of fear which completely engulfs her: ‘Fear possessed me. I found I was turning round and round, because of that shapeless menace behind me that might reach out and take me’ (20). Lessing makes it clear that this was a meaningless fear, but the effect it has on the girl is to subdue her and make her less confident of herself and her control over the landscape. It also undermines her position as part of a landowning settler society so that when she finally gets to the chief’s homestead she is conscious of the fact that she has intruded into his private domain: ‘I could see he was not pleased’ (21). In visiting the chief’s homestead the girl breaks the norms of settler society as well as tribal society. Dale Kennedy explains that ‘the boundaries that defined and delimited relations between white and black in settler

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society were unilateral in origin but bilateral in effect . . . each was constrained by stereotyped roles and social prohibitions from entering the zones of familiarity with the other’ (167).The girl in the narrative crosses not only racial barriers but also gender roles: it was only acceptable for white men to roam the veld (Chief 22).The hostility she senses in the people whose privacy she has invaded is translated into a sense of hostility in the landscape: [T]here was now a queer hostility in the landscape, a cold, hard, sullen indomitability that walked with me, as strong as a wall, as intangible as smoke; it seemed to say to me: you walk here as a destroyer. I went slowly homewards, with an empty heart. (23) Her identity changes from ‘Nkosikaas’ – Chieftainess, to ‘a destroyer’. This identity is constructed in relation to the landscape, which is simultaneously new and very old. It is as if by crossing a spatial border she is also crossing a temporal border and seeing a glimpse of the past, the precolonial landscape of Africa. Lessing’s heightened representation of the beauty of this landscape intensifies the sense of injustice perpetrated by the colonial power against people like Chief Mshlanga. It is not only children, however, who escape the confinement of domestic spaces. In ‘The Story of a Non-Marrying Man’ (Sun 32–48) the figure of Johnny Blakeworthy continually crosses the borders between domestic and wild African space. He alternates between living in a house, with a wife, and wandering around the wild countryside for months at a time. He returns to settler society occasionally and lives with different women at different times, in a type of serial polygamy, much to the disgust of the females in the settler community. Finally he joins an African tribe where he lives ‘in kindness’ (Sun 48) with an African woman, thus crossing the border between white and black society. Johnny Blakeworthy would have been seen by most people in the settler community as a ‘degenerate’. His actions disrupt the social norms which are carefully nurtured by the settler community: ‘Degeneration’ is another of those key words that possessed a special resonance in the colonial vocabulary. Antithetical to prestige, it served to convey the collapse of European values and standards of behavior, the transmutation of white men from civilized to barbarous beings. The symptoms of degeneration ranged from a relatively mild ‘mental inertia’, through a more serous alcoholic profligacy, to the terminal depravity of ‘going native’. This final stage was typified by adopting African dress,

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housing, customs, and especially by taking an African wife – becoming, in effect, a white African in European eyes. (Kennedy 173) Lessing, however, gives Blakeworthy sympathetic treatment by focalizing him through the children, who are fascinated by his roaming lifestyle: ‘Such a life, it goes without saying, set us restlessly dreaming of lives different from those we were set towards by school and by parents’ (34). She exposes the generational tension between children and adults in their attitude towards Blakeworthy, and in doing so delivers a critique of settler values. Their wasteful way of living is what drives him away from the domestic environment. He says to one of the women he lives with: ‘For crying out aloud, why cake all the time, why all these new dresses, why do you have to have new curtains, why do we have to have curtains at all, what’s wrong with the sunlight? What’s wrong with the starlight? Why do you want to shut them out? Why?’ (48) Blakeworthy’s philosophy is: ‘If you don’t spend a lot of money then you don’t have to earn it and you are free’ (47). He embraces discomfort and hardship in order to be free of the burden of consumerism. On his travels around the countryside, he sleeps without any type of shelter at all, rejecting domestic spaces in order to wander freely and sleep under the stars. These subversions of the norm serve to illustrate the complexity of the settler community and the divisions that occur within it. The spaces provided by house and hut confer status on the inhabitants which is interpreted as such by the community at large; a departure from the norm raises questions about the values on which the society is based.

Merging Spaces The complexity of place and space in a colonial context is further demonstrated in the story ‘Leopard George’ (Chief 172–201). When George is searching for a farm to buy in the beginning of the story, he finally finds one that suits him: He slouched comfortably all through that day over those bare and bony acres, rather in the way a dog will use to make a new place its own, ranging to pick up a smell here or a memory there, anything that can be formed into a shell of familiarity for comfort against strangeness. (175)

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Here we are given an interactive example of place-making. Meaning is not simply transferred from the subject to the object but the place itself offers up ‘a memory’, in spite of it being previously unknown. Lessing seems to be suggesting that a new place can yield memories to someone who is attuned to wildness. The image of the dog marking its territory strongly reinforces the idea that he is laying claim to the land and making it his own. The kinship that he feels for wild landscapes and wild animals means that he allows the boundaries between himself and the wilderness to be blurred. This is reflected in his garden: ‘his garden merged imperceptibly, in the reaching tendrils of the creepers, with the bush’ (198). Like his garden, which merges into the bush, he feels no definite boundary between himself and wildness. George merges ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ spaces by interacting on a personal level with both white and black communities. He transgresses the norms of settler society by crossing racial boundaries, but unlike Johnny Blakeworthy, he does not acknowledge these women publicly. In fact when one of the black women demands this type of recognition by appearing at one of his swimming parties with the white settler community it causes him to send her away permanently. She disrupts the enclosed domestic space by demanding a role other than the role of servant, which settler society designates as appropriate for black women. Ultimately, George’s exploitation of the human destroys his intimate relationship with the nonhuman. As a consequence of his cruelty in sending one of his women away at night, she is killed by a leopard. He then has to kill the leopard in return. However the leopard epitomizes wildness and wildness is part of his identity. Therefore it seems as if he is destroying his own identity, becoming the hunter of leopards rather than their protector. George’s subjectivity is constructed in relation to the ‘outside’ spaces of Africa, but his attempt to merge these spaces with the ‘inside’ spaces of settler society has tragic consequences for the African community and the natural environment.

Conclusion In describing Gary Snyder’s poetry, Terry Gifford coins the term, ‘post-pastoral’ (77–87). He says that the term ‘characterizes literature that transcends the closed circle of the pastoral and anti-pastoral modes’ (78). It does this by raising various questions that involve attitudes of awe and

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respect towards the natural environment, such as whether the poet achieves a position of humility ‘from a contemplation of the huge complexity behind the simplicity of the natural world we inhabit with the other species, forms and energies’ (80). I think we could say that Lessing’s representation of the wild spaces of the African landscape often evokes this kind of complexity, which engenders feelings of awe in her characters. This can be summed up in her own words: ‘Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape’ (‘Preface’ 8). In these stories Lessing demonstrates that colonial spaces are contested in different ways. The wildness of the African environment threatens the borders which enclose domestic spaces and the indigenous inhabitants of the land also contest these spaces, even though their power is limited. People like the Old Chief Mshlanga express their resentment and anger at their loss of land openly while the women challenge colonial spaces more subtly by becoming involved with settler men on a personal level. The borders between settler space and African space are continually being disrupted and redrawn. Whenever a border is crossed between the wild and the domestic spaces, it opens up possibilities for change and growth. I have attempted to integrate the discourse of space and landscape with the discourse of identity construction by emphasizing the way in which crossing borders into different spaces results in changes in subjectivity. The construction of identity in postcolonial discourse can be seen as a process of becoming. Stuart Hall refers to the production of a cultural identity as being ‘never complete; always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation’ (392). Similarly, Michael Keith and Steve Pile have argued that our sense of place is not fixed either: A different sense of place is being theorized, no longer passive, no longer fixed, no longer undialectical – because disruptive features interrupt any tendency to see once more open space as the passive receptacle for any social process that cares to fill it – but still, in a very real sense about location and locatedness. (Keith and Pyle 5) I suggest that when cultural identity is expressed in relation to landscape, it is not fixed because as soon as a boundary is crossed geographically, it often involves the crossing of psychological and social barriers at the same time which alters the construction of identity in the human subject.

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Works Cited Balfour, Robert. ‘Gardening in Other Countries: Schoeman, Coetzee, Conrad’. Unpublished paper presented at CSSALL conference, University of DurbanWestville, 1995. Bowker, Veronica. ‘Textuality and Worldliness: Crossing the Boundaries. A Postmodernist Reading of Achebe, Conrad and Lessing’. Journal of Literary Studies, 5.1 (1989), 55–67. Buckton, Oliver. ‘Race, Gender, and Anti-Pastoral Critique in Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing and Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm’. Doris Lessing Newsletter, 20.2 (1999), 8–12. Chennells, Anthony. ‘Doris Lessing: Rhodesian Novelist’. Doris Lessing Newsletter, 9.2 (1985), 3–7. — ‘Reading Doris Lessing’s Rhodesian Stories in Zimbabwe’. In Pursuit of Doris Lessing. Ed. Claire Sprague. London: Macmillan, 1990. pp. 17–40. Coetzee, John M. White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988. Gifford, Terry. ‘Gary Snyder and the Post-Pastoral’. Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction. Ed. J. Scott Bryson. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2002. pp. 77–87. Hall, Stuart. ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’. Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: A Reader. Eds. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. Hopkins, Gerard Manley. ‘Pied Beauty’. Poetry in English. Ed. M. L. Rosenthal. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. p. 748. Hunter, Eva. ‘A Sense of Place in Selected African Works by Doris Lessing’. Unpublished PhD. Thesis (1990), University of Cape Town. Keith, Michael and Steve Pile. Place and the Politics of Identity. London: Routledge, 1993. Kennedy, Dale. Islands of White. Durham: Duke University Press, 1987. Lessing, Doris. Going Home. St Albans: Panther Books, 1968. — Martha Quest. London: Panther, 1965. — This Was the Old Chief’s Country: Collected African Stories, Vol.1. London: Paladin, 1992. —‘Preface for the 1964 Collection’. This Was the Old Chief’s Country: Collected African Stories, Vol. 1. London: Michael Joseph, 1964. — The Sun Between Their Feet: Collected African Stories, Vol. 2. London: Flamingo, 1994. — Under My Skin. London: Harper Collins Publishers, 1994. May, Jon and Nigel Thrift. eds. Timespace: Geographies of Temporality. London: Routledge, 2001. McCormick, Kay. ‘The Child’s Perspective in Five African Stories’. Doris Lessing Newsletter, 9.2 (1985), 12–13. Rosner, Victoria. ‘“The Geography of that Wall”: Architectures of Motherhood in Under My Skin’. Doris Lessing Newsletter, 20.2 (1999), 12–15. — ‘Home Fires: Doris Lessing, Colonial Architecture, and the Reproduction of Mothering’. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 18.1 (1999), 59–89.

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Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. London: Harper Collins, 1995. Tuan, Ti-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 1977. Tyner, James. ‘Landscape and the Mask of Self in George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant”’. Area, 37: 3 (2005), 260–7.

Chapter 3

Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook: An Experiment in Critical Fiction Nick Bentley Keele University, UK

Introduction The prevailing critical reading of The Golden Notebook is of a novel in which Lessing works through her changing attitudes towards fiction, and that critically challenges her previous reliance on realism as her favoured form both aesthetically and politically.1 The novel has thus been seen as a turning point, or break in Lessing’s developmental experimentation with fictional form, in which her views on the ideological implications of fiction undergo at first a crisis, and then a reformation into a new style of writing, pointing towards her ‘inner space’ fiction of the later 1960s and 1970s. I want to argue, however, that The Golden Notebook is outside this model of Lessing’s writing as linear progression; rather, it stands on its own, as a more radically experimental novel than what comes before or after it. For me, the text does not represent Lessing’s working out of a changing attitude to realism but is a critical and philosophical investigation into the nature of fiction itself and the relationship between literary form and politics. This is borne out by some of the comments she has made on the novel since its publication in 1962. She has referred to it as ‘a kind of education’ (Bikman 63), and that ‘it completely changed me’ (Dean 89) signalling the profound impact the process of writing it had on her. Although she has also referred to it as ‘a failure in a formal sense’ (Dean 90), what The Golden Notebook achieves is a meta-critical exploration of the ideology of fiction writing, not only of realism, but a series of alternative forms of writing.2 This is the sense in which I refer to the novel in the title of this essay as a ‘critical fiction’: a form of writing that is presented as fiction, and operates as fiction, but simultaneously pursues a critical exploration of the nature of fiction and

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the mechanisms by which a novel communicates its meanings in a specific cultural environment. In this sense the novel blurs the boundaries between the recognition of fiction and literary theory as discrete forms of writing. This crossing of textual and formal borders is what makes The Golden Notebook a remarkable work, one that reveals aesthetic-historical concerns prevalent at the moment of its production, but also continues to speak to the theoretical exploration of the nature of fiction. In what follows, I discuss the way in which the novel articulates and negotiates specific anxieties and discourses in literary and critical debate in Britain during the late 1950s and early 1960s and in particular investigate the connections between Lessing’s work and the literary theories of Georg Lukács and Bertolt Brecht. I go on to suggest that Lessing’s speculations on the form and function of the novel as a genre at certain points in The Golden Notebook corresponds with later theoretical positions associated with postmodernism, and in particular, JeanFrancois Lyotard’s discussion of the sublime and the unpresentable in postmodern aesthetics.

Marxist Literary Theory and 1950s Contexts for an Ideology of Form To fully understand Lessing’s engagement with the ideology of literary forms as explored in The Golden Notebook it is necessary to discuss some of the debates circulating during the period it was produced. As is well known, Lessing was part of the New Left political-cultural habitus in Britain during most of the 1950s and early 1960s, which was heavily influenced by Marxist interpretations of literature.3 During the 1950s, the literary debates associated with Leftist thinking were often articulated in terms of an oppositional relationship between realism (including socialist and critical realism) and modernism. One of the main literary critics to emerge during this period is Georg Lukács, and although he was working in a different environment to Lessing, his thinking on the ideology of literary form is representative of a general approach on the Left at this time. In The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, for example (1956. Trans 1962), Lukács offers a critique of what he defines as the modernist position of overemphasis on form over content and this is the basis for his celebration of ‘critical’ realism. For Lukács, modernism represents the bourgeois impulse to subjectivity and individualism, while realism maintains the power to produce an objective yet critical reading of society, and thereby is more conducive in producing an art form that embraces political

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commitment (17–46). In discussing modernist writers he argues that, ‘By concentrating on formal criteria, by isolating technique from content and exaggerating its importance, these critics refrain from judgment on the social or artistic significance of subject matter’ (34). Lukács argues that modernism, although attempting to reject materialistic concerns, is itself dependent upon a particular bourgeois ideology and therefore speaks politically through its forms, ‘Modernist forms, like other literary forms, reflect social and historical realities – though in a distorted, and distorting, fashion’ (49). Raymond Williams, another influential voice in late 1950s literary and cultural criticism was also stressing the political aspects of realism. In the essay ‘Realism and the Contemporary Novel’, he argues that there are different realisms, and different ways of viewing realism, and that although a certain type of realism has been, ‘associated with the rising middle class, the bourgeoisie’ (274), other readings of realism show it to be, ‘in part a revolt against the ordinary bourgeois view of the world [ . . .] Thus “realism,” as a watchword, passed over to the progressive and revolutionary movements’ (275). It is this particular kind of ‘progressive’ or ‘committed’ realism that Lessing is pursuing for most of the 1950s, although she recognizes many of the flaws in certain types of writing labelled in this way. In the 1957 essay, ‘The Small Personal Voice’ she writes, ‘To say, in 1957, that one believes artists should be committed, is to arouse hostility and distrust’, but she goes on to stress, ‘I see no reason why good writers should not, if they have a bent that way, write angry protest novels about economic injustice’ (3). She later defines this in terms of a celebration of realism: I define realism as art which springs so vigorously and naturally from a strongly-held, though not necessarily intellectually-defined, view of life that it absorbs symbolism. I hold the view that the realist novel, the realist story, is the highest form of prose writing; higher than and out of reach of any comparison with expressionism, impressionism, symbolism, naturalism, or any other ism. (4) Until The Golden Notebook, Lessing’s preferred novelistic mode had been realism; it is the dominant mode of all her 1950s fiction from her first novel The Grass is Singing, published in 1950, through to the third part of her Children of Violence sequence, A Ripple from the Storm (1958). Realism carries for Lessing, during this period, a political imperative as well as a preferred aesthetic preference. The particular method of realism as discussed by Lukács and practised by Lessing involves a surface/depth model in terms of the expression of a subjective personal experience set against an underlying objective

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socio-economic framework. Although it is unlikely that they were aware of each other’s work, both writers acknowledge that the ‘great realists’ of the nineteenth century penetrate beneath the surface experience of individual characters to unmask the hidden socio-political forces that, in part, control the actions and ultimately the consciousness of individuals. As Lukács writes, Every major realist fashions the material given in his own experience, and in so doing makes use of techniques of abstraction among others. But his goal is to penetrate the laws governing objective reality and to uncover the deeper, hidden, mediated, not immediately perceptible network of relationships that go to make up society. (‘Realism in the Balance’ 38) And later he adds, Great realism, therefore, does not portray an immediately obvious aspect of reality but one which is permanent and objectively more significant, namely man in the whole range of his relations to the real world, above all those which outlast mere fashion. (48)

Realism and Commitment in The Golden Notebook By the time Lessing published The Golden Notebook in 1962, however, her conception of the relationship between realism and political commitment had significantly shifted. This is registered particularly in the complex structure of the book, which includes what Lessing describes as a ‘conventional’ novel called ‘Free Women’, disrupted by four ‘notebooks’ written by Anna Wulf, the main protagonist of the novel, and herself a novelist. The notebooks, which are coded by the colours black, red, yellow and blue, are distributed throughout the text, breaking up the linear progression of ‘Free Women’, and which ostensibly present the raw material from which that ‘publishable’ novel has been produced. These notebooks include a variety of formal styles showing Anna’s fragmented compartmentalization of her experience and feelings and her attempt to find a form of writing that will convey these accurately. These are eventually replaced by the ‘golden notebook’ section in which, as Lessing argues in her later ‘Preface’ to the novel, ‘the divisions have broken down, there is formlessness with the end of fragmentation (The Golden Notebook 7). In a style of metafiction that rejects conventional realist form, the complex structure of The Golden Notebook foregrounds its textuality, its status as a material artefact. It is in the Black Notebook in particular that Lessing, through Anna, begins to question the

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validity and veracity of realism as a form of writing. This is achieved in the first section of the Black Notebook through Anna’s self-critical review of the successful novel she has already published that described her experiences in South Africa: Frontiers of War. Here, Anna provides her own literary criticism of the form this novel takes, which, although it was planned and received as a committed realist text, she now recognizes is flawed in its attempt to portray the political and emotional realities of the situation. This conclusion prompts Anna into an investigation of the possibility of recording ‘real’ experience and the ideological grounding of the realist mode. For Anna, ‘realism’ has to be able to represent actual events and relationships (both personal and socio-political) ‘truthfully’. But her selfreflexive response to her writing begins to question the precise nature of experience and ‘truth’ when it is filtered through writing. To investigate this process, Anna tries to re-write the source material of her novel as truthfully as possible, in an attempt to overcome the false emphasis she now recognizes that her novel gave to the events. She writes, after mockreviewing her novel, that ‘the emotion it came out of was something frightening, the unhealthy, feverish, illicit excitement of wartime, a lying nostalgia, a longing for licence, for freedom, for the jungle, for formlessness’ (82). As well as showing the psychological impulse behind the writing, this passage also suggests the historical and ideological contexts informing the writing of her novel. What this has produced is a ‘lying nostalgia’ rather than the truth. This conclusion also forces Anna to question critically the basis on which a committed literature might be produced. How can a supposedly committed literature be sure that it evades the false consciousness that the dominant ideology produces at its moment of construction? Anna now sees that Frontiers of War is an example of false consciousness which causes her to ask, ‘Why a story at all – not that it was a bad story, or untrue, or that it debased anything. Why not, simply, the truth?’ (81–2). What Anna discovers is that writing the ‘truth’ is far from a simple process and is inevitably caught up in the ideology of the form in which one chooses to write. Truth thus becomes contingent and dependent on the way in which it is presented. By focusing on the process of turning experience into fiction, she discovers the contradictions upon which realism is formed. This revelation for Anna, represents Lessing challenging some of the Leftist thinking about the role of committed literature and its championing of the realist form. This is a crisis point for Anna in terms of realist form, but also, and more importantly, it registers a crisis in the ability of literature to act politically, as a committed aesthetic. If writing changes the ‘truth’ of the world, then how can it comment objectively

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upon socio-economic factors without resorting to the cultural frameworks that are determined by the dominant ideology that the committed literature purports to challenge?4

The Search for a New Committed Literary Form This is the starting point for Anna’s (and Lessing’s) exploration of different formal techniques in The Golden Notebook and this is where I want to argue she is influenced, although indirectly, by Bertolt Brecht’s ideas on political theatre.5 Brecht, like Lukács, argues that ‘realism’ should involve the ‘unmasking’ of socio-economic ideology and therefore carry a political message. In the essay ‘Against Georg Lukács’, Brecht writes, Realistic means: discovering the causal complexes of society/ unmasking the prevailing view of things as the view of those who are in power/ writing from the standpoint of the class which offers the broadest solutions for the pressing difficulties in which human society is caught up/ emphasizing the element of development/ making possible the concrete, and making possible abstraction from it. (82) However, Brecht also recognizes that new experimental forms are required to maintain a radical political literature in a changing society: ‘We shall not stick to too detailed literary models; we shall not bind the artist to too rigidly defined modes of narrative [ . . . ] Reality changes; in order to represent it, modes of representation must also change’ (82). Lessing’s experiment with different forms in The Golden Notebook corresponds more closely here to Brecht, and extends committed literature beyond the constricting Lukácsian reliance on conventional (and critical) realist form. The novel’s formal experiments are not an abandonment of a committed literature, but an experiment into how that commitment can be presented more ‘realistically’, more ‘truthfully’. Her concern with a new form corresponds to her thinking about the evolution of a new consciousness, as she writes in ‘The Small Personal Voice’, ‘I am convinced that we all stand at an open door, and that there is a new man about to be born, who has never been twisted by drudgery’ (8); and later, ‘Yet we are all of us, directly or indirectly, caught up in a great whirlwind of change’ (20). Although Lessing recognizes the profound changes in society and culture in the late 1950s, she was not, at this point extending this to formal concerns. In a later interview with Christopher Bigsby, however, she indicates

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that since writing The Golden Notebook, she has found the nineteenth-century realist novel ‘too narrow’ (Bigsby 72). One of the reasons for this is associated with her feeling that language is often inadequate in conveying deep feelings and emotions and she also attributes the discovery of this position in relation to the process of writing The Golden Notebook: ‘I recognized the limitations of language for the first time when I was searching for the words to depict Anna’s dreams in The Golden Notebook’ (Schwarzkopf 106). What Lessing attempts then in The Golden Notebook is to experiment with available literary forms in an attempt to discover a new form that will record reality as she perceives it subjectively, but will at the same time be able to reflect the deeper structures of living that affect people socially, politically and economically, allowing her to develop a new kind of committed literature. To reach this new form involves Anna testing out, criticizing and ultimately rejecting various literary and aesthetic styles. In the Notebooks, this includes short narratives that are based on psychological projection, anecdotes, factual statements, parody and pastiche, newspaper clippings and montage, epistolary forms, reviews, short stories and short story synopses, filmic storylines and dreams, all of which prove to be inadequate in reflecting accurately the individual’s relationship to the society in which she finds herself. This search for a new form has been read as Lessing, through Anna, working through her writer’s block and the impasse created by her disillusionment with realism as the ideal form for a committed literature. The novel as a whole, however, can be seen as a text that explores critically the ideological assumptions that lie behind a series of forms of writing and here again Brecht is an important influence. There has been little critical discussion of any connection between Brecht and Lessing in the 1950s and as far as I am aware he is not referred to in Lessing’s own comments on The Golden Notebook. The notable exception is Robert Arlett’s essay, ‘The Dialectical Epic: Brecht and Lessing’, in which he argues that Brecht’s ‘dialectical’ approach to the theatre offers a model for Lessing’s exploration of the relationship between the subjective self and the social world through her representation of Anna Wulf. Arlett also suggests that it is possible to ‘make a case for Lessing’s familiarity with Brechtian strategies’ (70) although he does not find any direct evidence of Lessing referring to Brecht in her comments on the novel. He does point out, however, that in The Golden Notebook, Willi, Anna’s lover in the Mashopi sections of the novel, hums ‘Mack the Knife’ and remembers ‘a man called Brecht’ (The Golden Notebook 126–7). Since Arlett’s essay was published in 1987, more evidence has emerged which suggests that Lessing was aware of Brecht’s techniques in the late 1950s. In the second volume of her

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autobiography, Walking in the Shade, for example, she recounts the impact of seeing Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble performance of Mother Courage in Paris in 1950 (Walking in the Shade 47). It is the case that Brecht’s work was largely unrecognized in Britain in the early 1950s, but it became increasingly important after the visit of the Berliner Ensemble to Britain in 1956. John Willet’s essay in the Times Literary Supplement, and Kenneth Tynan’s reviews of The Good Woman of Szechwan at the Royal Court Theatre in the same year, suggest that Brecht’s work was becoming increasingly known.6 It can be assumed, therefore, that Lessing would have been engaging in the debates around Brechtian theatre that were coming to the fore, especially, in the New Left circles in which she was moving at this time. It is through the theatre that Lessing picks up the techniques that she eventually transfers to her fiction. The important link here is her drama Play with a Tiger, which was written in 1958 but not performed until 1962. The longish production process of the play, therefore, spans this crucial period in Lessing’s thinking about commitment and literary form and it clearly shows affinities with Brechtian techniques. In her notes on directing the play she explains: ‘When I wrote Play with a Tiger in 1958 I set myself an artistic problem which resulted from my decision that naturalism, or, if you like, realism, is the greatest enemy of the theatre’ (Play With a Tiger 3). This shows that her advocacy of great realism in the novel, which she was propounding in ‘The Small Personal Voice’ in 1957, was certainly not extended to the theatre the year later. Brechtian techniques used in the play are also referred to in the director’s note: I wrote the play with an apparently conventional opening to make the audience expect a naturalistic play so that when the walls vanished towards the end of Act One they would be surprised (and I hope pleasantly shocked) to find they were not going to see this kind of play at all. (3) Although Lessing does not cite Brecht directly, the techniques she refers to are very close to Brecht’s ‘alienation technique’ which includes an agenda of disrupting the expectations of the audience and forcing them to reconsider their relationship with the dramatic events they see on the stage. This disruption of expectations is also clearly at play in the structure of The Golden Notebook, which begins as a ‘conventional’ novel, but is then fragmented across the series of Anna’s notebooks.7 Brecht’s technique of foregrounding the materiality of aesthetic production serves like Lessing to emphasize the connectedness of the theatrical production with the world outside the theatre. In ‘A Short Organum for the

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Theatre’, Brecht describes the technique thus: ‘A representation which alienates is one which allows us to recognize its subject but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar’ (121). The alienation effect serves to foreground the artifice of production, to maintain and not to suspend disbelief in the theatrical presentation, and thereby forcing the audience to engage directly not only with the performance on the stage, but with the ‘real’ sociopolitical world outside the theatre, which inscribes the meaning of the performance. For Brecht, ‘[A performance] must amaze its public, and this can be achieved by a technique of alienating the familiar’ (122). This is also what Lessing is trying to do in The Golden Notebook. By employing a series of metafictional techniques and writing styles she wants to draw attention to the materiality of writing and thereby to emphasize the political and ideological contexts in which different literary forms operate and produce meaning. In particular, the structure of the text succeeds in blurring the distinction between real and fictional, forcing the reader into engaging in actual socio-political debates within the society from which the text is produced. The Golden Notebook is particularly complex in terms of the identification of authorship and the complicated layering of narrative levels.8 Anna Wulf is ostensibly a character in the frame novel ‘Free Women’, but she is also the narrator of the four notebook sections. She is then both a product and producer of fiction, as well as a critical reader of her own and other people’s work. The narrative structure is further complicated by two additional factors. First, some characters who appear in the notebooks are different than their apparent fictional equivalents in ‘Free Women’, for example, Saul Green of the notebooks is called Milt in ‘Free Women’. Secondly, authorship of ‘Free Women’ is ambiguous in that it is suggested in ‘The Golden Notebook’ section that Saul Green gives Anna the first words of a new novel which are ‘The two women were alone in the London flat’, which Lessing and many critics have pointed out, is the first sentence of ‘Free Women’.9 As Molly Hite has suggested, the foregrounding of authorship ultimately questions the nature of reality, ‘all parts of the novel are equally “fictional”, a conclusion making the “real”/“fictional” opposition irrelevant and indicating that the relation of one account to the other cannot be one of container to contained’ (The Other Side of the Story 97–8). This blurring of the roles of author, narrator, character and reader corresponds in a novelistic context to what Brecht advocates in political theatre: the disruption of the relationship the audience has traditionally had with the dramatic spectacle it experiences. The drama should not simply

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be entertainment for a passive audience, but should prompt that audience into action by showing that both fictional characters and real people exist in the same ideological contexts. In terms of technique, Brecht writes: As we cannot invite the audience to fling itself into the story as if it were a river and let itself be carried vaguely hither and thither, the individual episodes have to be knotted together in such a way that the knots are easily noticed. The episodes must not succeed one another indistinguishably but must give us chance to interpose our judgement [ . . .] The parts of the story have to be carefully set off one against another by giving each its own structure as a play within a play. (‘A Short Organum for the Theatre’ 131) The ‘knots’ of The Golden Notebook are easily noticed, in fact they are foregrounded by Lessing’s juxtaposition of the notebooks and ‘Free Women’, and the inconsistencies of events and characters between these two ‘texts’ all of which serves to highlight the constructedness of the text.10 Nevertheless, the novel maintains a political critique of many aspects of contemporary capitalist society. What The Golden Notebook reveals is a form of fictional writing that does not reject the possibility of a committed writing, but shifts away from the form it was assumed that writing should take in the late 1950s and into the early 1960s. This point is further pursued in Lessing’s later writing about The Golden Notebook, which in effect continues the debates around fictional form beyond the first publication of the novel. In 1971, Lessing produced the ‘Preface’ to the novel, which is now published with every edition, and has become, in a sense, part of the series of metafictional levels the reader is now required to negotiate. Just as Anna self-reflexively questions the nature of her fiction as it is presented in the novel, then the ‘Preface’ constitutes Lessing’s own reflections on The Golden Notebook: the structural parallel between Anna and Frontiers of War and Lessing and The Golden Notebook are clear – they both reflect a writer critically engaging with their own fiction. Lessing’s reflections on her novel suggest a shift of emphasis from the author’s intention as the basis of the production of meaning in a text to the reader’s interpretation that is reminiscent of the position taken by Roland Barthes in his famous 1967 essay ‘The Death of the Author’. As Barthes writes, ‘To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the text’ (147).11 Lessing makes a similar

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point in her ‘Preface’ when reflecting on the way she felt her novel had been misunderstood by readers: it is not only childish of a writer to want readers to see what he sees [. . .] his wanting this has misunderstood a most fundamental point. Which is that the book is alive and potent and fructifying and able to promote thought and discussion only when its plan and shape and intention are not understood, because that moment of seeing the shape and plan and intention is also the moment when there isn’t anything more to be got out of it. (22, italics in original) That this reflection is made nearly ten years after the first publication of the novel shows the engagement with the mechanics of fictional form that the novel was continuing to produce not only for readers but also for its author. This engagement, in a Brechtian sense, includes a political and ideological reflection on the place fiction holds in contemporary culture and society and the importance of formal techniques in encouraging such reflection in the reader.

The Golden Notebook, Postmodernism and the Unpresentable This recognition of a Brechtian approach to the teasing out of the ideological structures and contexts informing the deployment of literary form suggests that the novel, to a certain extent, achieves a position that attempts to explain and justify the experimentation with form, effectively re-containing the novel within a modernist, (but not realist), model of writing. The concentration on the medium of the writing, rather than the referential world that it attempts to represent, places the novel in a modernist paradigm. I want now to argue, however, that alongside this position, the text includes passages that reveal a far more destabilizing discourse on the adequacy of writing itself; one that tends more to a postmodernist model of writing.12 In his seminal essay, ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?’ Jean-François Lyotard attempts to suggest a difference between a modernist and postmodernist aesthetic in terms of its relationship to a Kantian notion of the sublime. In differentiating between these two aesthetic approaches he rejects a periodizing definition of the relationship between postmodernism and modernism, suggesting alternatively that, ‘A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism

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thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant’ (Lyotard 79). I understand this definition of the ‘nascent state’ of postmodernism not simply to mean that it represents a primary state from which a fully grown modernism will emerge, but to refer to a radical instability that appears in the logic of modernism, that threatens, through its love of paradox, to collapse the platform upon which the modernist re-rationalizing is constructed. This is why Lyotard refers to the postmodern state as ‘constant’. There are moments in The Golden Notebook that reveal something of Lyotard’s understanding of a radical postmodernism contained within the modernism established through her adoption of Brechtian alienation effects. Take, for example, the following passage from the ‘Black Notebook’ section of the text in which she digresses from her description of Willi Rodde, to muse on the impossibility of writing being able to adequately capture the essence of an individual human being: [W]hat I really discovered, though I didn’t know it then, was that in describing any personality all these words are meaningless. To describe a person one says: ‘Willi, sitting stiffly at the head of the table, allowed his round spectacles to glitter at the people watching him and said, formally, but with a gruff clumsy humour:’ Something like that. But the point is, and it is the point that obsesses me [. . .] once I say that words like good/ bad, strong/weak, are irrelevant, I am accepting amorality, and I do accept it the moment I start to write ‘a story’, ‘a novel’, because I simply don’t care. All I care about is that I should describe Willi and Maryrose so that a reader can feel their reality. [. . .] So what I am saying is, in fact, that the human personality, that unique flame, is so sacred to me, that everything else becomes unimportant. (The Golden Notebook 89) What is included in the ‘unimportant’ here is the novel as a form of writing, and indeed, writing itself. Reality becomes a matter of feeling; something that language is inadequate to articulate. The ‘human’, as Lessing describes it here, takes on qualities associated with Lyotard’s reading of the Kantian sublime. For Lyotard, the sublime is described in the following way: ‘We can conceive the infinitely great, the infinitely powerful, but every presentation of an object destined to “make visible” this absolute greatness or power appears to us painfully inadequate. Those are Ideas of which no presentation exists’ (Lyotard 78). For Lyotard, the sublime is identified by the impossibility of presenting it to the human consciousness, and it is its very unpresentable nature that established its power.

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For Lessing in the passage from The Golden Notebook quoted above, it is the ‘human’ that takes on a quality of the order of the sublime; something that is so ‘sacred to me’ that it evades description. This is the postmodern paradox that emerges at moments in The Golden Notebook: the novel form, a form which Lessing’s liberal humanist position has previously regarded to be founded on the need to understand the nature of the human, is found in fact to be inadequate in the face of the unpresentable nature of the reality of human existence. What Lessing takes from this moment, however, is the necessity to continue writing despite the inadequacy of the medium in which she is working. Logically, the novel should end at the point when writing is recognized as inadequate to describe the human. However, it doesn’t: Anna continues, as does Lessing. This is where the novel parallels Lyotard’s sense of the postmodernist (rather than modernist) response to the unpresentability of the sublime: The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies the solace of good forms [ . . . ] that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable. (81) The paradoxical position that Lessing reaches, through Anna’s reflections on writing, is ultimately rejected by the novel as a whole, preferring a Brechtian model of political engagement through experiment with form. Yet the postmodern impasse remains as an unsettling presence in the novel, and is part of its metacritical engagement with the nature and limitations of writing.

Conclusions Lessing does not abandon committed literature in The Golden Notebook, nor does she reject a literary theory based on Marxist theories. Through her self-reflexive scrutiny of the nature of writing and the novel form she passes though the radical instability of a postmodern literature of exhaustion to try and discover a new form adequate to her purpose. What she achieves is a new form of fiction that continues to provide a critique of aspects of dominant, Western, capitalist society, but does not rely on the 1950s emphasis on realism as the primary form for such a critique. The Golden Notebook, then, represents a shift from a Lukácsian celebration of critical realism to a Brechtian emphasis on experimentalism as a way of adapting committed

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literature to the changing political and ideological circumstances prevalent in the earlier 1950s. In this sense the novel initiates a form of British fiction that is experimental and moves beyond conventional or classic realism and yet maintains a politically committed agenda. She is then part of a trend of post-1945 and contemporary writers that include Julian Barnes, John Berger, Angela Carter, Janice Galloway, Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Graham Swift, Emma Tennant, Alan Warner and Jeanette Winterson. This connects with a specific kind of postmodernism that Dominic Head has referred to as ‘British postmodernism’, a national trend that takes on board many of the attitudes and radical scepticism of postmodernism, but maintains an ethical basis and a dialogue with realism (The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction 229). Lessing’s combination of experimental form with a committed agenda also resonates with Patricia Waugh’s idea of a ‘weak postmodernism’ (as opposed to a ‘strong’ variety) in which she suggests: ‘we may arrive at a shared structure of values, a sense of personal significance, and the possibility of belief in historical progress through collective engagements which do not require foundations of truth or value’ (‘Feminism and Postmodernism’ 355).13 It is this balancing of a scepticism towards monolithic, inherited structures of truth and the possibility of a continued political critique for fiction that emerges in Lessing’s experiment with literary form in The Golden Notebook.

Notes 1

2

3 4

5

6

7

See Draine, Substance Under Pressure; Whittaker, Doris Lessing; King, Doris Lessing; and Fahim, Doris Lessing and Sufi Equilibrium. See King (1989, 36–54) for a discussion of the novel as ‘reflexive’ as it, ‘raises questions about the nature and function of the novel’ (37). I use habitus in the sense that Pierre Bourdieu uses the term (Bourdieu 1984). This is the contradiction that Pierre Macherey and Etienne Balibar highlight in their influential essay, ‘On Literature as an Ideological Form’. Although Brecht’s writings are of an earlier period, they only became widely discussed by the British Left in the 1950s and 1960s. See Williams, 1979, 216. See John Willett’s ‘Bertolt Brecht: An Iconoclast in the Theatre’ which was the front page editorial in Times Literary Supplement, 9 March 1956. Tynan’s several articles on Brecht in the 1950s (1956–1959) are collected in Tynan on Theatre, 228–43. John Willett’s book The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht (1959) was also an important publication in the influence of Brecht in Britain in the 1950s. See also Willett 1998; Thomson 1997; Rebellato 1999, 148–54. So much so that one early reviewer criticized Lessing because, ‘Her material has got badly out of hand, and in desperation she has bundled the whole lot together’ (‘The Fog of War’ 280).

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9

10

11

Several critics have explored the complex structure of The Golden Notebook: Schlueter, The Novels of Doris Lessing; Draine, Substance Under Pressure; Whittaker, Doris Lessing; King, Doris Lessing; and Fahim, Doris Lessing and Sufi Equilibrium. Whittaker, Doris Lessing, 64; King, Doris Lessing, 52–3; Hite, The Other Side of the Story, 96. For a discussion of Brecht’s alienation technique, or ‘Verfremdung’, see White, Bertolt Brecht’s Dramatic Theory, 121–6. Interestingly, Barthes makes reference to Brecht in his idea of removing the ‘Author’ from the process of literary interpretation: The removal of the Author (one could talk here with Brecht of a veritable ‘distancing’, the Author diminishing like a figurine at the far end of the literary stage) is not merely an historical fact or an act of writing; it utterly transforms the modern text. (‘Death of the Author’ 145)

12

13

I am not, of course, the first to identify the postmodern aspects of The Golden Notebook; see Danziger (1996), Henke (1994), Hite (1989), Michael (1996). As Waugh acknowledges, her reference to ‘weak’ postmodernism owes a lot to Seyla Benhabib’s work on feminism and postmodernism (Benhabib, Situating the Self). Benhabib is a Turkish-Jewish academic who has worked primarily in the United States, therefore, the idea of ‘weak’ postmodernism is not restricted to a British context, nevertheless it equates to an approach that appears frequently in British postmodernist fiction.

Works Cited Arlett, Robert. ‘The Dialectical Epic: Brecht and Lessing’. Twentieth Century Literature, 3.1 (1987), 67–79. Barthes, Roland. ‘The Death of the Author’. In Image Music Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana, 1977. pp. 142–8. Benhabib, Seyla. Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992. Bigsby, Christopher. ‘The Need to Tell Stories’. In Putting the Questions Differently: Interviews with Doris Lessing 1964–1994. Ed. Earl G. Ingersoll. London: Fontana, 1996. pp. 70–85. Bikman, Minda. ‘Creating Your Own Demand’. In Putting the Questions Differently: Interviews with Doris Lessing 1964–1994. Ed. Earl G. Ingersoll. London: Fontana, 1996. pp. 57–63. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984. Brecht, Bertolt. ‘Against Georg Lukács’. In Aesthetics and Politics. Eds. Ronald Taylor et al. Trans. Stuart Hood. London: New Left Books, 1977. pp. 68–85. —1949. ‘A Short Organum for the Theatre’. In Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader. Ed. Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. pp. 107–35.

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Danziger, Marie A. Text/Countertext: Postmodern Paranoia in Samuel Beckett, Doris Lessing, and Philip Roth. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Dean, Michael. ‘Writing as Time Runs Out’. Putting the Questions Differently: Interviews with Doris Lessing 1964–1994. Ed. Earl G. Ingersoll. London: Fontana, 1996. pp. 86–93. Draine, Betsy. Substance under Pressure: Artistic Coherence and Evolving Form in the Novels of Doris Lessing. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983. Fahim, Shadia S. Doris Lessing and Sufi Equilibrium: The Evolving Form of the Novel. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. ‘The Fog of War’. The Times Literary Supplement. 27 April 1962. 280. Head, Dominic. The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Henke, Suzette. ‘Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook: A Paradox of Postmodern Play’. In Rereading Modernism: New Directions in Feminist Criticism. Ed. Lisa Rado. New York: Garland, 1994. pp. 159–87. Hite, Molly. The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narrative. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989. King, Jeanette. Doris Lessing. London: Arnold, 1989. Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook. 1962. London: Grafton Books, 1973. — The Grass is Singing. 1950. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961. — Play with a Tiger and Other Plays. London: Flamingo, 1996. — A Ripple from the Storm. 1958. London: Panther, 1966. — ‘The Small Personal Voice’. In Declaration. Ed. Tom Maschler. London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1957. pp. 11–28. — Walking in the Shade: Part Two of My Autobiography, 1949–1962. London: Harper Collins, 1997. Lukács, Georg. 1956. The Meaning of Contemporary Realism. Trans. John and Necke Mander. London: Merlin Press, 1963. — ‘Realism in the Balance’. In Aesthetics and Politics. Ed. Ronald Taylor et al. London: New Left Books, 1977. pp. 28–57. Lyotard, Jean-François. ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?’ The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. pp. 71–82. Macherey, Pierre and Etienne Balibar. ‘On Literature as an Ideological Form’. Literature in the Modern World. Ed. Dennis Walder. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. pp. 223–7. Michael, Magali Cornier. Feminism and the Postmodern Impulse: Post World War II Fiction. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Rebellato, Dan. ‘Brecht in Britain’.1956 and All That: The Making of Modern British Drama. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. pp. 148–54. Schlueter, Paul. The Novels of Doris Lessing. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973. Schwarzkopf, Margarete von. ‘Placing Their Fingers on the Wounds of Our Times’. In Putting the Questions Differently: Interviews with Doris Lessing 1964–1994. Ed. Earl G. Ingersoll. London: Fontana, 1996. pp. 102–08. Thomson, Peter. Brecht: Mother Courage and Her Children. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

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Tynan, Kenneth. Tynan on Theatre. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964. pp. 228–43. Waugh, Patricia. ‘Feminism and Postmodernism’. In Modern Literary Theory. Ed. Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh. 4th edn. London: Arnold, 2001. pp. 344–59. White, John J. Bertolt Brecht’s Dramatic Theory. New York: Camden House, 2004. Whittaker, Ruth. Doris Lessing. London: Macmillan, 1988. Willett, John. ‘Bertolt Brecht: An Iconoclast in the Theatre’. Times Literary Supplement, 9 March 1956. 141–2. — The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht. London: Methuen, 1959. — Brecht in Context. Revised edition. London: Methuen, 1998. Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution. London: Chatto and Windus, 1961. — Politics and Letters: Interviews with the New Left Review. London: New Left Books, 1979.

Chapter 4

Doris Lessing’s Fantastic Children Roberta Rubenstein American University in Washington, DC

Doris Lessing has always been a border-crosser – both literally, as one who spent her formative years in Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia) and moved to England in young adulthood shortly before publishing her first novel, The Grass is Singing (1950); and literarily, as one who expresses her ideas through, and across, a variety of literary forms, including novels, short stories, plays, poems, polemical and occasional essays, memoirs, autobiography, and even opera scores and graphic novels. Even within narrative genres, Lessing seems to enjoy traversing borders and crossing boundaries, embracing mimesis, fable, speculative fiction and the fantastic, sometimes in the same novel. Between 1969 and 1988, she published eight novels that demonstrate her interest in hybrid narratives and speculative fictions: The Four-Gated City (1969); the ‘inner-space fiction’, Briefing for a Descent into Hell 1 (1971); The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974); the five-volume series, Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979–1983), set in outer space; and The Fifth Child (1988). Since then, she has expressed disappointment that readers insist on categorizing her as either a realist or a fantasist, whereas, in her words, ‘What I object to is the narrowmindedness of both sides. I don’t see why people shouldn’t enjoy both equally’ (Ingersoll 233). The genres of science fiction and fantasy lend themselves to the kind of category-straddling that Lessing enjoys because they offer opportunities to traverse boundaries in both thematic and structural senses. As Lucie Armitt proposes, ‘References to borders and frontiers have always been the staple discourse of outer-space fiction’ (Theorising the Fantastic 8). However, Tsvetan Todorov theorizes that, regardless of their imagery or their thematic concerns, fantastic narratives in particular are, by their very nature, boundary-straddling texts that complicate our notions of genre. These narratives must be distinguished from the ‘fabulous’ or ‘marvellous’ by the unique

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demands they make on their readers: when events, characters or other details in an apparently mimetic narrative seem to violate assumptions about consensus reality, readers necessarily hesitate between natural and supernatural explanations. According to Todorov, the ‘heart of the fantastic’ is an event that ‘cannot be explained by the laws of . . . [the] familiar world. . . . The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event’ (The Fantastic 25). Furthermore, fantastic texts must meet three conditions. First, the text must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural and supernatural explanation of the events described. Second, this hesitation may also be experienced by a character; thus, the reader’s role is . . . entrusted to a character . . . and the hesitation . . . becomes one of the themes of the work. Third, the reader must adopt a certain attitude with regard to the text: he will reject allegorical as well as ‘poetic’ interpretations. These three requirements do not have an equal value. The first and the third actually constitute the genre; the second may not be fulfilled. (33) By contrast, Rosemary Jackson theorizes the fantastic not in terms of genre – since it may appear in a variety of genres – but as a literary mode that situates itself along a continuum between the mimetic and the marvellous. In marvellous texts such as fairy tales and romances, events are typically set in remote or imaginary realms; the reader, like the protagonist, is ‘merely a receiver of events’ (Fantasy 33). At the other end of the spectrum, mimetic texts ‘make an implicit claim of equivalence between the represented fictional world and the “real” world outside the text’ (34). Betwixt and between, fantastic narratives confound or straddle these categories by ‘assert[ing] that what they are telling is real – relying upon all the conventions of realistic fiction to do so – and then . . . [breaking] that assumption of realism by introducing what – within those terms – is manifestly unreal’ (34). As a result, it is the ‘real’ itself that is ‘under constant interrogation’ (36) in the fantastic. These complementary approaches are useful for considering several of Doris Lessing’s border-crossing ‘interrogations of the real’ through youthful or juvenile characters who occupy the figurative borderlands between the real and the fantastic: Joseph Batts of The Four-Gated City (1969), Emily Cartwright of The Memoirs of a Survivor (1975) and Ben Lovatt of The Fifth Child (1988).

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The Four-Gated City, the final volume of Children of Violence, is the only novel in that series that departs from mimetic realism. Martha Quest, through her close association with Lynda Coldridge – a woman gifted with supernormal consciousness, though her family and the larger culture regard her paranormal abilities as evidence of ‘madness’ – slowly develops telepathic abilities and learns to access extra wavelengths of consciousness. As the narrator observes, The civilized human race knew that its primitive members (for instance, Bushmen) used all kinds of senses not used by itself, or not admitted: hunches, telepathy, ‘visions,’ etc. It knew that past civilizations, some of them very highly developed, used these senses and capacities. It knew that members of its own kind claimed at certain times to experience these capacities. But it was apparently incapable of putting these facts together to suggest the possibility that they were calling people mad who merely possessed certain faculties in embryo. (496) During the late 1960s, Martha, Lynda and other highly evolved friends who have cultivated such extrasensory capacities prophetically see a ‘shadow from the future’ (565): the intimation of a large-scale catastrophe. The calamitous event that nearly destroys Britain occurs sometime during the 1970s. Since the novel was published in 1969, the events described in the Appendix to The Four-Gated City obviously take place in what was then ‘the future’. The Appendix consists of, among other documents, communications sent by Martha Quest from an uncontaminated island somewhere off the coast of Scotland to Francis Coldridge in Nairobi, where he has established a resettlement camp. Martha and other survivors of the Epoch of Destruction (563) have adapted to living on the limited natural resources of the island. Years after her resettlement, Martha describes events and encounters that directly challenge the ‘real’ at a level beyond that of the extrasensory capabilities described earlier in the narrative. She reports that she and others have occasionally, met and talked to people who were not of our company, nor like any people we had known – though some of us had dreamed of them. It was as if the veil between this world and another had worn so thin that earth people and people from the sun could walk together and be companions. (604) Concurrently, a number of children on the island are born with various forms of what the adults recognize as supernormal psychic abilities. Some

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of them ‘“hear” as none of us or any of those we worked with – even Lynda – could’ (606). Another group of children, ‘when they were tiny, used to shut their eyes tight and laugh, and did not want to open them again. They were watching the pictures on their lids. This capacity faded as they grew older, but not entirely’ (606). Martha speculates that such a capacity may not be truly supernormal but simply an ability that all children once had but that atrophied as a result of its invalidation by adults. She wonders how many children ‘in the old days had this capacity but lost it because they were laughed out of it or punished for “telling lies”?’ (606) Three girls and four boys with diverse racial characteristics ranging from dark skin and hair to flaxen hair and blue eyes are recognized as especially gifted. Although they speak and act like normal children, they can both ‘see’ and ‘hear’ things far beyond the ordinary. The children seem mentally ‘superior’ to the adults on the island, ‘beings who include [the history of the human race in the twentieth century] in themselves and who have transcended it. They include us in a comprehension we can’t begin to imagine’ (608). One of these ‘marvellous’ (609) children, Joseph Batts, is the son of a black man who, as a child, was left with the evacuees from London who made their way to safety. Joseph has explained to Martha that ‘more like [him] are being born now in hidden places in the world, and one day all the human race will be like them’ (608). Martha understands that she and her age peers are about to be superseded: people like herself are ‘a sort of experimental model and Nature has had enough of us’ (608). Ironically, when the eight-year-old Joseph actually reaches Francis Coldridge’s resettlement camp near Nairobi – we are not told how he makes his way from the island near Scotland to East Africa – his exceptional qualities are not immediately recognized. Rather, he is classified by authorities as ‘subnormal’ (609) and regarded as fit only for such menial tasks as ‘work on the vegetable farm’ (609). Nonetheless, the reader understands that Joseph is the seed for a new generation with visionary consciousness and the emissary of guarded hope for the future of humankind. The Four-Gated City concludes with a letter to Francis Coldridge from his step-daughter Amanda, who writes that Joseph has been assigned to ‘inspect parks and gardens within the limits of seven miles from the city. . . . It will be in order for him to attend courses on gardening. I take it that your statement that he is ten yours old is a misprint?’ (614) Although readers of the Appendix do not have access to the inner workings of Joseph Batts’s consciousness, he is, by virtue of his described exceptional capabilities, Lessing’s first fantastic, liminal child character. His psychic giftedness is presented as the logical expansion of mental

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capabilities that, before the catastrophe, had slowly been developing in a small group anchored by Martha Quest and Lynda Coldridge. As the narrative alters its terms from realistic mimesis to speculative fiction, a reader may ‘hesitate’ – to invoke Todorov’s conceptual framework – between natural and supernatural explanations for Joseph’s presumed exceptional psychic qualities. Is he indeed the natural heir of evolving visionary consciousness achieved by a few individuals in Martha’s generation (and in previous generations) only through demanding psychic ‘work’? Or is he a mutant with capacities inherited from a non-human source – the strange people from the sun ‘who [were] not of [their] company’ that Martha and others met or observed? In either case, the gifted children are endowed from birth with the extrasensory capacities for which Lynda Coldridge was judged ‘mad’. Characters and events in The Memoirs of a Survivor (1976) take readers even further than does The Four-Gated City beyond the boundaries of the ‘real’. Set in a nameless city during an unspecified future time in which social organization is in rapid collapse – perhaps as the result of a cataclysmic event like the one alluded to in The Four-Gated City –the novel focuses on a nameless Narrator who discovers that she can move between different orders of reality. Suggestive of the magical entry point into the fantastic – the border between real and unreal that appears in such classic children’s novels as C. S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe –the ‘margin between the two worlds’ (The Memoirs of a Survivor 13) is, in this case, not an item of furniture but a wall of the Narrator’s flat, whose wallpaper pattern features imagery of ‘flowers, leaves, [and] birds’ (11). Sometimes spontaneously and sometimes as a result of the Narrator’s willed concentration, the wall becomes permeable and offers her entry into diverse environments. During the course of the narrative, the world of her flat and the domain beyond the wall become intimately related: each time she ventures across the ‘mysterious frontier’ (144), she returns with new insights into her own personal and family history as well as glimpses of unrealized potentialities. Shortly after she discovers the fantastic realm beyond the wall of her flat, an unknown man leaves a young girl in her care – analogous to Joseph Batts of The Four-Gated City, who was left as a child with Martha and her friends at the time of the catastrophe in England. Announcing to the nameless Narrator of Memoirs only that ‘this is the child . . . she’s your responsibility’ (15), the stranger disappears from her purview and from the narrative. Accompanying the newly arrived 12-year old, Emily Cartwright, is Hugo, an animal that also straddles the boundary between real and fantastic. Not only does he possess ‘cat’s eyes in a dog’s body’ (63) but he seems capable of experiencing a range of human feelings, including emotional pain, sadness and longing.

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In the current time of the narrative, the young Emily matures at a rapid pace that far exceeds mimetic reality. While her chronological age advances by only a year, she transmogrifies both physically and psychologically from a child to a young adult, suggesting that time is ‘unreal’ even on the near side of the Narrator’s magical wall. Shedding one ‘chrysalis’ (60) after another, Emily advances from puberty and preoccupation with her developing body, through first passion, sexual initiation, homemaking, heartbreak and a state of emotional disillusionment more characteristic of a love-jaded woman in her thirties or forties (201). Simultaneously, beyond the wall the Narrator encounters versions of the child Emily at different ages and stages of her life. Indeed, in her various manifestations, Emily embodies significant – usually disturbing – moments in the Narrator’s own emotional history, with the emphasis on early childhood. This dimension of the domain beyond the wall is static and immutable; in a suffocating realm that she terms the ‘personal’, the Narrator can only witness events with no possibility of participation or agency in them. In several scenes, the young Emily appears as an unloved, repudiated child who provokes her mother’s exasperation, disgust and neglect and who feels guilt and shame without understanding their sources. As readers eventually realize, the child represents the crucial fixed points of the Narrator’s own unhappy childhood. She is, as the Narrator phrases it, ‘as close to me as my own memories’ (47). Her admission may be understood not only narratively but biographically. Lessing’s view of The Memoirs of a Survivor as ‘an attempt at autobiography’2 confirms another dimension of her boundary-straddling strategies. The sites and scenes that the Narrator observes beyond the wall of her flat are thinly disguised representations of Lessing’s own early emotional history;3 in one sense, the ‘survivor’ may be understood as the author herself. The child Emily is notably absent from other areas beyond the wall of the Narrator’s flat. In those domains, the Narrator actively engages with dynamic, perpetually changing environments that manifest themselves either as interior spaces where she participates in the cooperative ‘work’ of reclamation and rehabilitation or as verdant gardens that inspire her sense of wonder and potentiality. In contrast to those expansive gardens, the literal underworld outside the Narrator’s flat is in an accelerating process of social breakdown and collapse, represented by the appearance of a breed of fantastic, anarchic children who are utterly different from Emily Cartwright. The pre-adolescent children who were ‘born in the Underground’ – the term carries a connotation beyond the literal –‘defy all attempts at assimilation’ (175) into any form of social organization apart from a dog-eat-dog survival strategy. Indeed, they would gladly kill and roast

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the endearing Hugo if the dog/cat were not vigilantly protected by the Narrator. Rather than accepting even the minimal constraints necessary for social cooperation, they bite the very hands that feed them, physically attacking their surrogate parents, Emily and her boyfriend – the community leader, Gerald. Unlike Joseph Batts and the other supernormal, visionary children who appear in the Appendix to The Four-Gated City, the feral children of The Memoirs of a Survivor are ‘worse than animals and worse than men’ (180). Yet, despite their barbaric behaviour, the Narrator insists that they are not Other; rather, they are ‘ourselves’ (181). Envoys from a primitive or ‘underground’ of human experience that may also signify the underground that lies below consciousness, they dramatize the limits of socialization in the absence of a family structure – whatever its weaknesses as a social institution as it appears in much of Lessing’s fiction – in the face of catastrophe. The feral children of Memoirs, the dark aspect of Lessing’s liminal child characters, are ultimately reclaimed in the fantastic apotheosis that takes place beyond the borders of the Narrator’s flat at the novel’s end. However, they anticipate another of their kind. The collapsing city of Memoirs is uncomfortably similar to the London of the 1960s depicted early in The Fifth Child (1988). As the narrator of the latter novel reports, ‘Brutal incidents and crimes, once shocking everyone, were now commonplace. Gangs of youths hung around certain cafés and street-ends and owed respect to no one. . . . There was an ugly edge on events: more and more it seemed that two peoples lived in England, not one – enemies, hating each other. . .’ (The Fifth Child 22). Once this context is established, the narrative focuses more immediately on domestic than societal breakdown. However, developments in the latter realm have important social – and fantastic – implications as well. The central characters, Harriet and David Lovatt, rather than experimenting with alterative lifestyles and freedoms promised by the cultural liberalism of the 1960s, wish only for a traditional happy marriage, complete with a large brood of children. They seem well on their way to achieving their dream, producing four children in six years. Then Harriet unexpectedly becomes pregnant with a child that, well before its birth, foreshadows the unravelling of the Lovatts’ domestic idyll and signals the narrative’s interrogation of the ‘real’. From the beginning, Harriet’s fifth pregnancy is atypical. The foetus is so combative that she fears it is ‘trying to tear its way out of her stomach’ (Fifth Child 38). Feeling herself ‘possessed’ (39), she even imagines that she harbours not a human foetus but an animal with hooves and claws that gash her flesh from inside.

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In the eighth month of pregnancy, when the 11-pound infant literally fights its way out of Harriet’s womb, Ben – as he is named – confirms her suspicion that she has been gestating a monster. At birth, he hardly resembles a human infant. Rather, he has a ‘heavy-shouldered hunched look. . . . His forehead slope[s] from his eyebrows to his crown. His hair [grows] in an unusual pattern from the double crown. . . . His hands [are] thick and heavy, with pads of muscles in the palms’ (48–9). When Harriet looks into his eyes, which (untypically) can focus at birth, there is no connection; rather, their gaze is ‘cold’ and ‘malevolent’ (52). The infant nurses so aggressively that, after five painful weeks, during which Harriet feels as if ‘her whole breast was disappearing down his throat’ (51), she weans him. The words that come to mind when she observes him –‘troll’, ‘goblin’, ‘beast’, ‘creature’, ‘alien’ (49) and ‘Neanderthal’ (53) – suggest a figure from the pages of myth, fairy-tale or horror story, something Other and not human.4 Matters do not improve. While Ben is barely a toddler, his parents are alarmed by the suspicious strangulation of a friend’s dog and the mysterious death of the Lovatts’ cat. When he begins to talk, he immediately speaks in complete sentences, but only to announce his imperious demands: ‘“I want cake”’ (Fifth Child 68). The toddler is so unmanageable that Harriet and David feel obliged to lock him in his room and bar the doors and windows for the protection of their other children. Yet Harriet’s conviction that she has given birth to a ‘changeling’ (59) is repeatedly dismissed or invalidated by the medical establishment. In the face of evidence to the contrary, not a single doctor or other authority is willing to support the Lovatts’ conviction that Ben’s behaviour is even mildly unusual. Harriet’s ‘oldfashioned’ paediatrician concedes only that the child is ‘hyperactive’ (63). In fact, doctors more readily identify the problem as Harriet’s, blaming Ben’s difficult behaviour on her negative attitude towards him and patronizingly assuring her that such non-maternal feelings on her part are ‘not abnormal’ (54). Among other things, The Fifth Child explores the ways in which pressures to maintain cultural normalcy may directly invalidate and undermine the truth of the ‘real’ individual experience. When David gives Harriet an ultimatum – either Ben must go or he will – and declares that the only solution is to place the aberrant child in an institution, Harriet balks, citing their paediatrician’s judgement that their fifth child is ‘normal’. David responds, ‘He may be normal for what he is. But he is not normal for what we are’ (65). David wins the argument. Soon after Ben is institutionalized, Harriet, wracked by guilt, visits him and is revolted by the subhuman level of care he and other abandoned children receive. Finding her wayward child drugged and straitjacketed in a foul cell, she

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recognizes that he will soon die under such intolerable conditions and brings him back home with her. Her anguished decision catalyzes the ultimate collapse of her family. By the novel’s end, Harriet’s longed-for dream of domestic happiness has fully unravelled; her other children have left home in protest, David has withdrawn into his professional life, and the Lovatts’ house is for sale. The Fifth Child is compelling not only because of its genre border-crossings but because of its disturbing moral concerns: is there any compromise possible between the needs of a family to maintain emotional cohesion and the needs of a profoundly anti-social, aberrant child? Who or what should be sacrificed, the Lovatts’ idealized model of family life or the abnormal Ben who radically undermines it? In the context of Todorov’s theory of the fantastic, readers of The Fifth Child are likely to hesitate between natural and supernatural explanations for the physically and emotionally anomalous child who is incapable of giving or receiving affection; who cannot adapt to social norms; who is virtually uneducable; who wrecks his parents’ family life; but who is more or less ‘happy’ with an ‘alienated . . . hostile tribe’ (129) of ‘unassimilable’ (120) youths who permit him to tag along with them.5 Harriet is convinced that Ben is an evolutionary throwback to a ‘race that reached its apex thousands and thousands of years’ (130) ago. The ‘underground’ first depicted on the near side of the Narrator’s wall in The Memoirs of a Survivor haunts the borderlands of The Fifth Child as well. Harriet wonders if her child descends from a people who were ‘at home under the earth . . . deep underground in black caverns lit by torches’ (Fifth Child 122). Is Ben indeed the product of a stray gene that lay dormant in the gene pool for millennia until its actualization in Harriet Lovatt’s fifth pregnancy? Or is he a goblin child or changeling – a creature from myth and fairy tale?6 As his putative father only half-jests, is Ben simply a creature ‘just dropped in from Mars . . . to report on what he’s found down here’ (74)? Or is he, as Harriet’s doctors collectively insist, a child well ‘within the range of normality’ (103) – a problem only because of his problem mother, whose irrational antipathy towards him explains – and produces – his anti-social responses? Even if one discounts the Martian hypothesis, Lessing resists offering her readers a single answer to these possibilities as she directly interrogates the ‘real’ from several angles. The idea or ideal of domestic happiness is what becomes impossible in The Fifth Child. While Tsvetan Todorov emphasizes that the fantastic provokes a reader’s hesitation between natural and supernatural explanations of events, Rosemary Jackson theorizes that such narratives are concerned with limits, not only in the genre sense but in psychological and/or metaphysical senses (Fantasy 78). Accordingly, the

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fantastic frequently has a subversive, at times even a transgressive, function, foregrounding ‘an uncertainty [regarding] the nature of the “real”. . . , [of] categories of “realism” and “truth,” of the “seen” and “known” (in a culture which declares “seeing is believing”)’ (Fantasy 48–9). Although it is risky to generalize about Lessing’s social and ideological positions on the basis of only three of her juvenile characters, one may hazard that these diverse fantastic children represent different stages in her social critique between the 1960s and the 1980s. Joseph Batts, the supernormal, visionary orphan child who appears at the conclusion of The Four-Gated City signifies the potentiality for renewal. His emergence after the Epoch of Destruction, arguing for the evolution of higher consciousness and societal regeneration, is distinctly different in tone and function from Ben Lovatt, the child who destroys his family through the sheer accident of his being in the world. The highly evolved Joseph embodies the positive dimension of the fantastic ‘unseen’ of culture. Moreover, the potentiality for normalizing more advanced levels of consciousness is associated with organic and spiritual growth. It is not coincidental that Joseph’s vocation in the post-apocalyptic Nairobi resettlement camp is gardening – despite the fact that his exceptional capabilities are apparently overlooked when he first reaches Africa. The connection between a child character and the organic natural world is equally noteworthy in The Memoirs of a Survivor. In the fast-forward time and collapsing social spaces described in the narrative, the fantastic Emily Cartwright is, like Joseph Batts, associated with gardens. As the helpmate of Gerald, a young man who becomes the leader of abandoned urban children, Emily establishes an ‘exemplary’ and entirely functional vegetable garden with ‘not a weed or flower in sight’ (Memoirs 133–4). The garden is soon demolished by the anarchic children who fail to understand its purpose. In this later novel, the ‘unseen’ Other of culture manifests itself not benignly but destructively, as the gang of youths subverts the conditions for social cooperation and community – not unlike Ben Lovatt’s careless rending of the domestic sphere occupied by his anguished parents and bewildered siblings. In the fantastic ending of Lessing’s dark ‘memoir’, even the savage children are salvaged: they are welcomed by Gerald and Emily into the numinous space beyond the dissolved walls of the Narrator’s flat. Among the survivors, it is the child/woman Emily who is most fantastically transformed by the developments beyond the wall: readers learn, without further elaboration, that she is ‘quite beyond herself, transmuted and in another key’ (217). The collective apotheosis at the narrative’s end suggests still another

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kind of border crossing. Rather than renewing the social body, the group of survivors crosses a ‘threshold’ (217), collectively escaping from chaos into a different and fantastic order of reality. Led by a numinous female presence – a deus ex machina identified only as ‘One’ (231) – they exit from chaos and disintegration, ‘out of this collapsed little world into another order of world altogether’ (213). Implicitly, survival in the disintegrating ‘real’ world has become unsustainable. The subversive function of the fantastic ‘fifth child’ prompts a far more problematic set of questions about the nature of the ‘real’ since, apart from the character Ben, the narrative is resolutely situated in consensus reality. Perhaps it is not too far-fetched to suggest an analogy with Kafka’s Metamorphosis, in which the manifestly ‘unreal’ disturbingly and matter-of-factly invades the ‘real’. Apart from the immediate consequences of Gregor Samsa’s awaking one morning as a giant hard-bodied insect with human consciousness, other characters and events in Kafka’s narrative are described mimetically. Readers invariably hesitate between regarding Gregor as a person and as an insect: as some-one or some-thing. Similarly, in The Fifth Child, Harriet’s doctors perceive Ben as ‘within the range of normality’ and the other Lovatts perceive him as not-quite-human. Harriet, torn between these mutually exclusive positions, finds herself excruciatingly divided. Disturbed by her son’s ‘Neanderthal’ characteristics and behaviour, she also feels compelled to rescue him from institutional murder, though she later acknowledges his inability to comprehend or appreciate the moral significance of her intervention. Instead, he continues to disrupt and ultimately to destroy the ordinary life to which his parents have innocently aspired. As the Lovatt family fragments under siege by a child to whom Harriet herself has given – and extended – life, she wonders whether Ben is a punishment for her naïve belief that individuals can dictate the terms of their domestic happiness. Ben Lovatt thus functions as a fantastic child not only in Todorov’s generic sense – provoking the reader’s hesitation between natural and supernatural explanations – but also in Rosemary Jackson’s sense of subversive function and interrogation of the real. He catalyzes questions about boundaries and limits, including moral and social questions about the construction of normalcy, family life and maternal responsibility. The transgressive Other is embodied not as an abstract concept in the social body but as an agent of disintegration within the privileged intimate space of family life itself. Though readers typically associate fictional children with innocence, this term is not entirely applicable to Lessing’s fantastic children. First, we know each child only from external descriptions rather than through his or her own interior life. Joseph Batts is little more than a symbolic figure who

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suggests the purity of childhood enhanced by the potentiality for visionary growth and spiritual renewal. Emily Cartwright occupies two initially selfcontained narrative strands that are literally separated by the wall in the Narrator’s flat: her early life as the stand-in for her guardian’s own history as an innocent, albeit beleaguered child; and, in the narrative’s present time, a child-woman who rapidly loses both her childishness and her innocence. Her accelerated physical and emotional development mirrors the accelerating social collapse around her. The word ‘innocence’ is obviously irrelevant in the case of Ben Lovatt, who neither possesses nor loses it. Though he cannot be held responsible for his physical and psychological Otherness, he lacks the qualities of purity or potentiality that traditionally characterize fictional children. Indeed, by puberty, he has reached ‘maturity’ but only in a physical sense: the point at which no further growth is likely. At the conclusion of the novel, there is neither a restorative symbolic garden nor a fantastic apotheosis but only the destruction by the aberrant child of the family into which he was born. In this sense, he is Lessing’s darkest and most transgressive child character. In the sequel to The Fifth Child, Ben, in the World (2000), published 12 years later, Lessing imagines Ben’s troubled young adult life as he attempts to make his way in the larger world. In the latter novel, he becomes a more sympathetic character because his Otherness presents unlimited opportunities for his exploitation. Nonetheless, there is no escape from the effects of his anomalousness; his odyssey culminates with his suicidal leap into an abyss. In both novels, the fantastic is inserted into and destabilizes the ‘real’. The only fabulous element is the anomalous borderline character, Ben Lovatt himself. The fantastic children in Lessing’s narratives are thus pivotal characters in both structural and thematic senses. Structurally, they challenge the boundaries of narrative mimesis as readers find themselves hesitating between natural and supernatural explanations for their Otherness. Thematically, they function subversively and even transgressively, obliging readers to ponder the significance of their exceptionality for the narratives in which they appear. In their different kinds of fantastic Otherness, these child and juvenile characters enable Lessing to foreground and problematize the nature or reliability of the real in the context of vulnerable social institutions and values. As agents for her exploration of domestic and social scripts of the past, present and alternative futures, Lessing’s fantastic children reflect not only her interest in borders and hybrid forms but the progressive darkening of her view of the potentiality for positive social transformation.

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Notes 1

2 3

4

The statement on the frontispiece of the novel reads, ‘Category: Inner-Space Fiction – For there is never anywhere to go but in’. Briefing for a Descent into Hell. Dust jacket, The Memoirs of a Survivor (1975). Lessing has described the emotionally fraught relationship with her mother that began literally with her own difficult birth. Emily Maude Tayler frequently expressed her disappointment with Doris, who, as the adult Lessing came to realize, was ‘an impossibly difficult baby, and then a tiresome child, quite unlike my little brother Harry who was always so good. . . . My memories of her are all of antagonism, and fighting, and feeling shut out; of pain because the baby born twoand-a-half years after me was so much loved when I was not’. Later, she adds that her mother ‘paralyzed me as a child by the anger and pity I felt. Now only pity is left, but it still makes it hard to write about her. What an awful life she had, my poor mother!’ ‘Impertinent Daughters’ 61 and 68. Of note, Lessing gave her mother’s name to the fantastic Emily of her fictional Memoirs. Isabel C Anievas Gamallo reads The Fifth Child as a horror story in the tradition of female Gothic, with a focus on the subjects of birth and maternal anxiety. She observes that the novel evolves, from the presentation of the painful recognition of the Other within the self to the disturbing acceptance of the Other within society. Thus, while cannibalizing the conventions of myth, folklore, fairy-tale and romance and recontextualizing them in a neogothic story of contemporary alienation, Lessing manages to create a doubly subversive tale, transgressive both of patriarchal ideals of motherhood and civilized western social, cultural and racial discourses. (‘Magic, Fable and the Gothic in Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child’ 123)

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6

Although I share Gamallo’s view that the novel is a subversive and transgressive text, I disagree with her contention that Ben as Other ‘cannot be represented’ (121). See ‘Magic, Fable and the Gothic in Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child’. Ellen Pifer proposes a likeness between Ben Lovatt and Mary Shelley’s nameless monster, arguing that, ‘In the vision of contemporary society that Lessing evokes, the human being, human culture, is losing definition – reverting to a condition that, for all its technological complexity, recalls the dark wilderness of our alien past. . . . Lessing . . . reworks and subverts the themes of Frankenstein through her suggestion of a lack of culturally defined borders. . . . Who can say that [Ben’s] nature is other, alien or nonhuman, when his actions, speech, and conduct are indistinguishable from those of his cohorts, who merge with the undifferentiated mass’. Demon or Doll 143, 146. Lessing has acknowledged that a number of ideas contributed to the character of Ben in The Fifth Child, including her fascination with ‘little people’. As she phrases it, ‘every country in the world has legends of the little people, and I’ve got a thing that they probably existed’. She also mentions a piece she read by the archaeologist Loren Eiseley, who described his reaction to a young girl he observed in Maine. Her appearance was so striking and unnatural that he was prompted to think, with

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shock, that she was ‘a Neanderthal girl. . . . [S]he had the flaring eyebrow ridges and funny back to her head.’ Tomalin interview in Ingersoll 175–6.

Works Cited Armitt, Lucie. Theorising the Fantastic. London: Arnold/Header, 1996. Gamallo, Isabel C. Anievas. ‘Magic, Fable and the Gothic in Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child’. In Theme Parks, Rainforests and Sprouting Wastelands: European Essays on Theory and Performance in Contemporary British Fiction. Eds. Richard Todd and Luisa Flora. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000. pp. 113–24. Ingersoll, Earl G. ed. Doris Lessing: Conversations. Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review Press, 1994. Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. 1981. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Lessing, Doris. Ben, in the World. London: Flamingo, 2000. — Briefing for a Descent into Hell. New York: Knopf, 1971. —‘Describing This Beautiful and Nasty Planet’. Interview with Earl G. Ingersoll. Ingersoll 228–40. — The Fifth Child. 1988. New York: Vintage Random, 1989. — The Four-Gated City. Children of Violence, Vol. 5. 1965. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969. —‘Impertinent Daughters’. Granta: Autobiography. Vol. 14 (Winter 1984), 51–68. — The Memoirs of a Survivor. 1975. New York: Bantam, 1976. —‘Watching the Angry and Destructive Hordes Go Past’. Interview with Claire Tomalin. Ingersoll 175–6. Pifer, Ellen. Demon or Doll: Images of the Child in Contemporary Writing and Culture. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 2000. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Trans. Richard Howard. Cleveland: Case Western Reserve P, 1973.

Chapter 5

The ‘Jane Somers’ Hoax: Aging, Gender and the Literary Marketplace Susan Watkins Leeds Metropolitan University, UK

In her Nobel lecture, Doris Lessing draws a sharp contrast between writing and reading in contemporary Zimbabwe and in the United Kingdom. In Zimbabwe books are precious because of their rarity and the paucity of the publishing scene means that voices sometimes remain unheard. She continues: Let us now jump to an apparently very different scene. We are in London, one of the big cities. There is a new writer. We cynically enquire: ‘Is she good-looking?’ If this is a man: ‘Charismatic? Handsome?’ We joke, but it is not a joke. This new find is acclaimed, possibly given a lot of money. The buzzing of hype begins in their poor ears. They are feted, lauded, whisked about the world. Us old ones, who have seen it all, are sorry for this neophyte, who has no idea of what is really happening. He, she, is flattered, pleased. But ask in a year’s time what he or she is thinking: ‘This is the worst thing that could have happened to me.’ Some much-publicized new writers haven’t written again, or haven’t written what they wanted to, meant to. And we, the old ones, want to whisper into those innocent ears: ‘Have you still got your space? Your soul, your own and necessary place where your own voices may speak to you, you alone, where you may dream. Oh, hold on to it, don’t let it go’.1 Lessing’s comments here focus on the emergence of a celebrity culture around authorship, which stresses the importance of appearance, huge advances and marketing hype at the expense of what we might want to call creativity, imagination or authenticity. The fact that she expresses concerns

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about the manipulation of authors (particularly new authors) in the Nobel lecture signifies that this is an important issue for her; however, it is by no means a new one. In 1983 and 1984 Doris Lessing published two novels, The Diary of a Good Neighbour and If the Old Could using the name ‘Jane Somers’, which purported on the book jacket to be ‘the pseudonym of a well-known woman journalist’. Using this pseudonym, she had submitted the manuscript of the first novel to her usual publishers, Jonathan Cape and Granada, who both rejected it, Granada arguing that ‘it was too depressing to publish’ (Preface to Diaries 7). The novels were, however, accepted and published to moderate critical acclaim by Michael Joseph, who had published her first novel, The Grass is Singing, in 1950. Once genuine authorship was acknowledged, both novels were eventually republished in 1984 in one volume as The Diaries of Jane Somers, with a new preface by Lessing that discussed the reasons for her literary imposture. Lessing’s ‘play’ with the literary establishment and the publishing industry has become one of the most well-known literary hoaxes. It is clear that even as early as the 1980s Lessing was preoccupied by questions relating to the marketing and reception of literary fiction. She chose to explore that by crossing what is perhaps the most fundamental border of all for writers: the border of authorial identity. The Jane Somers hoax clearly raises a number of interesting issues about authorship, canonicity and literary production, which critics have to some extent addressed. Writing in 1991, Cora Agatucci made an early claim for the novel’s significance as ‘a new entry in the ongoing conversation represented by Lessing’s corpus, a confrontation with previous authorial identities readers have constructed from her works’ (47). More commonly, however, The Diaries has been celebrated for its provocative treatment of aging, gender and the body, a subject which has until recently received little serious treatment in fiction, despite growing concerns about an aging population at the close of the twentieth century. The fact that very few critics have made any connections between the issues raised by the hoax and the subject matter of the novels seems to be a serious omission. This essay argues that there is an integral relationship between the two; that Lessing specifically questions the expectations of and ‘proper’ role for women authors entering the third stage of life and criticizes the prominence of youth and beauty in the writing and marketing of the woman author. The novel achieves this by making use of a generic and formal complexity that masquerades as naïve realism. What is striking is that the issues raised by the hoax and the novel itself anticipate a growing body of feminist

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criticism precisely concerned with the relationship between gender, authorship and commercial culture. The heroine and narrator of The Diaries is an ambitious, confident career woman who works for a woman’s magazine called Lilith. She is 49 in the first novel and in her early fifties in the second. At the opening of the first novel she acknowledges that she is emotionally repressed and self-centred. Having been ‘in denial’ since her husband’s and her mother’s deaths (both from cancer), she unexpectedly befriends an old lady in her nineties named Maudie Fowler. Getting to know Maudie allows Janna to confront her own fear of aging, death and decrepitude and engages her in the domestic labour of caring for the elderly: ‘women’s work’ that she admits was for her previously invisible and unimaginable. The novel is visceral in its descriptions of filth and poverty and its focus on the maintenance of the body and the domestic environment is one of its most memorable elements. Janna is obsessed with style, image and grooming, which is related to her job in the women’s magazine industry but is also an aspect of what Judith Butler might term her ‘performative’ construction of femininity. Maudie’s filthy home, incontinence and physical frailty allow Janna to re-evaluate this aspect of her identity. As the novel develops and Janna’s time spent caring for Maudie increases she begins to curtail her elaborate grooming of her own clothes, body and interior décor: And I see that I did not write down, in Janna’s day, about going to the loo, a quick pee here, a quick shit, washing one’s hands. . .All day this animal has to empty itself, you have to brush your hair, wash your hands, bathe. I dash a cup under a tap and rinse out a pair of panties, it all takes a few minutes. . .But that is because I am ‘young’, only forty-nine. What makes poor Maudie labour and groan all through her day, the drudge and drag of maintenance. I was going to say, For me it is nothing; but the fact is, once I did have my real proper baths every night, once every Sunday night I maintained and polished my beautiful perfect clothes, maintained and polished me, and now I don’t, I can’t. It is too much for me. [Ellipses in the original] (Diaries 135) Janna’s emphasis here is not only on what is excluded from our understanding of femininity but also on what is excluded from writing: what she did ‘not write down’ (but actually of course did). Many critics have praised Lessing for including in fiction what has often remained an unwritten part of women’s lives. Articles about The Diaries in the journals Literature and Medicine and the Journal of Aging Studies demonstrate that the novel certainly

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holds its own in the context of the most up-to-date gerontological scholarship. James Krasner claims that the novel is an important and accurate depiction of the significance of spatialized memory in elderly experience of domestic space and that it echoes and augments recent research on the importance for elderly people of remaining in their own homes. Mari-Ann Berg reads The Diaries in relation to Mikhail Bakhtin’s philosophy of dialogism and suggests that dialogism provides a fruitful contrast to ageism in the novel. A recent special issue of the journal Doris Lessing Studies entitled ‘Coming to Age’ also makes frequent reference to The Diaries and discusses Lessing’s ‘pioneering’ work in ‘preparing her readers to welcome “the old man or woman waiting to emerge” from within each one of us’ (Rege 3). Other feminist readings situate the novel in relation to a number of important theoretical perspectives informed by ideas about mothering and maternity (Greene, The Diaries), the double and the mirror (Tiger), the abject (Wallace) and empathy (Kegan Gardiner). However, very few of these analyses consider the pseudonymous publication of the novel to be of particular relevance to notions of what are or are not appropriate subjects for fiction. Lessing’s literary imposture can, of course, be read as an attempt to circumvent the restrictions or cross the borders of what Foucault would term the ‘author function’, or to stage what Roland Barthes might refer to as the ‘death’ of ‘Doris Lessing’. In her Preface to The Diaries she alludes to both aims: ‘I wanted to be reviewed on merit, as a new writer, without the benefit of a ‘name’; to get free of that cage of associations and labels that every established writer has to learn to live inside’ (5). And yet, rather perversely for those who might wish to align her with a poststructuralist suspicion of essentialist ideas about authorial identity, Lessing gives the impression that she was delighted when some readers were suspicious and recognized her writing: What is it that the perspicacious recognize, when they do? After all, Jane Somers’s style is different from Lessing’s. Each novel or story has this characteristic note, or tone of voice – the style, peculiar to itself and selfconsistent. But behind this must sound another note, independent of style. What is this underlying tone, or voice, and where does it originate in the author? It seems to me we are listening to, responding to, the essence of a writer here, a groundnote. (7) The concept of the authorial ‘essence’ or ‘groundnote’ corresponds closely with the idea of a writer’s ‘space’, ‘soul’ or ‘necessary place’ as described two decades later in the Nobel lecture. Yet Lessing’s attraction to traditional

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Romantic conceptions of the author as the creative origin of the text is complicated as the preface continues. She goes on to argue that the publishing industry makes it very unlikely that the astute would recognize her ‘essence’ or ‘groundnote’ in a work even if her name were attached. To the reading public, the figure of the novelist Doris Lessing has a label: ‘she is a writer about the colour bar (obsolete term for racism) – about communism – feminism – mysticism; she writes space fiction, science fiction. Each label has served for a few years’ (5). Such labels may, particularly as time passes, bear less and less relation to the ‘groundnote’ or ‘essence’ of Lessing’s own sense of her authorial identity; yet publishers rely on such labels to promote fiction, which, in circular fashion, further reinforce readers’ expectations. Lessing discusses in the preface some of the commercial imperatives that shape this process, such as literary prizes and the short ‘shelf lives’ of books by unknown authors as opposed to the construction of celebrity status for well-known authors. Her arguments would seem to support Foucault’s contention that the author function arises alongside and is an intrinsic part of a modern commercial culture ‘once strict rules concerning author’s rights, author–publisher relations, rights of reproduction, and related matters were enacted’ (202). Yet several recent studies have demonstrated that the ‘commerce’ of literature has existed quite happily alongside anonymity and pseudonymity. Writing about eighteenth-century literature, David Saunders and Ian Hunter claim that ‘there is no necessary equivalence between a writer’s aesthetic or ethical personality and the elements of legal personality that the writer (among other individuals) may acquire through the process of publication’ (491). More recently, John Mullan suggests that ‘if we reopen once celebrated cases of anonymity, can we see how, for their first readers, an uncertainty about their authorship could give new and original works of literature a special voltage?’ (7). Mullan’s study of anonymous and pseudonymous publication concludes that a work that ‘appears without its true author’s name’ has a paradoxical effect: it ‘sends not just critics but ordinary readers off in search of the author’ (297). Mullan does, however acknowledge the importance of one historical development: ‘Anonymity became much less common in the twentieth century’ (286); he claims that an important reason for the shift away from anonymous publication is that ‘the business of selling authors became inextricable from the business of selling books’ (287). In fact, Lessing recognizes in the preface that in adopting a pseudonym she does not escape the commercial constraints of modern literary production so much as exchange one set of constraints (those of a well-established literary celebrity) for another (a woman journalist who has made a first

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attempt at breaking into the world of ‘literary’ fiction publishing). It would appear then that Lessing’s intentions were more complex than merely to point out how grubby economic motives taint and corrupt the purity of the novelist’s artistic imperative. In choosing to publish pseudonymously she aimed to examine the nature of authorship for women and point out the connections between gender, age, genre and literary and other kinds of production. In doing so she was in advance of a steadily increasing critical interest in the relationship between the publishing and book-selling industry and the literary work itself. Pierre Bourdieu’s earlier examination of ideas about taste, distinction and the ‘field’ of cultural production is extremely relevant here. In ‘The Field of Cultural Production; or, the Economic World Reversed’, first published in 1983, he claims that ‘the work of art is an object that exists as such only by virtue of the (collective) belief which knows and acknowledges it as a work of art’ (35). The belief in the work’s value is produced by ‘critics, publishers, gallery directors and the whole set of agents whose combined efforts produce consumers capable of recognizing the work of art as such’ (37). The job of critics is to explore this process and inevitably, for Bourdieu, such an exploration means recognizing that the literary or artistic field is subject to change, rather than static; it can be defined as ‘a field of forces, but it is also a field of struggles tending to transform or conserve this field of forces’ (30). Elaborating on the metaphor of struggle and force, he later uses an analogy that is particularly suggestive in the context of this essay collection, arguing that the field of cultural production can be characterized by the ‘extreme permeability of its frontiers’ (43). Defining the borders, frontiers or limits of the field involves the attribution of cultural respectability or capital to particular texts and authors; the border, although permeable, is extremely contested. However, whereas gender is not a central issue in Bourdieu’s analysis, his approach is, as Mary Eagleton argues, ‘equally applicable to female authors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’(7). Indeed, McDermott argues that ‘one significant strand’ [of the most recent feminist criticism] ‘focuses on the relation between women’s literature and the marketplace: the culture of literary prizes, the connection between (post)feminism and popular fictional forms such as ‘chick lit’, and the celebrity culture surrounding particular female authors’ (1732). As early as 1998, the collection Writing: A Woman’s Business aimed to consider ‘the issues of consumerism as they affect women’s position in a commercial environment, where issues of gender frequently disturb the always fraught transmission from imaginative creation to printed page’ (Simons and Fullbrook 1). The collection is

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unique in that it includes not only literary criticism, but also essays by the authors Margaret Drabble, Maggie Gee and Lisa Appignanesi and an interview with Carmen Callil, the founder of the Virago publishing house. In Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain Claire Squires claims that, [T]he last two decades of the twentieth century underwent an intensification in the marketing activity surrounding literary fiction. This intensification came about through a variety of factors including the increased financing available to publishing, conglomeration and globalization and competition at all levels. (6) It would perhaps not be too much of an exaggeration to say that Lessing was quite early in sensing an alteration in the publishing climate (or, in Bourdieu’s terms, the literary field) that other writers and critics have subsequently begun to address. When considering Lessing’s strategy in adopting a younger woman journalist’s authorial voice or persona interesting contrasts can be drawn with other twentieth-century fakes and impostures. In a number of well-known recent cases of imposture that occurred in Australia white writers have assumed minority ethnic authorial identities. Critics have claimed that in these cases those who feel threatened by affirmative action policies and increasingly visible cultural differences have been tempted to adopt a minority ethnic pseudonym and writing identity. In the case of Australian imposture, therefore, ‘it is questions of cultural and racial difference, rather than sexual or gender difference, which preoccupy those who feel themselves to have “lost out” in the cultural changes of post-war Australia’ (Nolan and Dawson xv). The adoption of a faked Jewish diasporic identity has also been important in some of the most well-known instances of ersatz holocaust testimony such as Binjamin Wilkomirski/Bruno Doessekker’s Fragments: Memories of a Childhood 1939–1948. In both cases it has been argued that the ‘commodified authenticity’ (Takolander and McCooey 58) of contemporary authorial identity is what is being tested. The fact that, as Sue Vice puts it, ‘ethnicity may be taken for personal identity’ (183) in contemporary literary culture (and indeed in culture more widely) has arguably led to the creation of an ‘alterity industry’ that leads to the ‘global commodification of cultural difference’ (Huggan vii) that Huggan terms the ‘postcolonial exotic’. Although Lessing’s hoax does not explore the relationship between ‘race’, ethnicity and commercial literary culture, it does seem apparent that in using the pseudonym she was able temporarily

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to adopt a comparatively youthful but still feminine writing identity. Doing so enabled her to cross a border into a new ‘space’, one which allowed her the capacity to address questions of gender, genre and aging. My contention that few critics have recognized this fact has here to be qualified somewhat. Cynthia Port claims that [T]he questions about economies of moral and material value raised throughout The Diary of a Good Neighbour – What is a good life? A Good neighbor? A good investment? – are mirrored by the questions about aesthetic value introduced by the novel’s anonymous publication . . . Whereas the fashion cycle venerates that which is youthful and new, the publishing industry banks on the accumulated symbolic capital of successful authors. Indeed, by masking her identity in a cloak of youthful anonymity, Lessing restages the plot of the novel, demonstrating the usually underappreciated value of accumulated age and experience. At the same time, however, she calls attention to the dangers of rapid cycles of obsolescence and disposal, which skew estimations of aesthetic and moral value. (34) Port situates these astute comments right at the end of her essay, however, as though they are an afterthought and therefore they demand further exploration. Is it the case that the publishing industry ‘banks on the accumulated symbolic capital of successful authors’ if those authors are women? The ‘venerat[ion] of that which is youthful and new’ would seem to apply to women writers much more than to men. Admittedly Lessing’s comments in the Nobel lecture acknowledge the increasing importance of appearance for male ‘new finds’ as well as women, but she notes that the ineffable quality of ‘charisma’ is also important for male authors, whereas only looks are significant for women. In 1983, Lessing’s ‘image’ was already beginning to shift towards that of the ‘grande dame’, a term which, as I have suggested elsewhere, has a number of less than flattering connotations, such as being old and out of touch, part of the establishment and a comic pantomime figure (Watkins). Diana Wallace also suggests that ‘it is ironic, however, that she [Lessing] could only make visible the issues of women’s aging and death through the mask of a pseudonym’. Writing before the award of the Nobel, Wallace continues: ‘there is also a further irony in the fact that, at least in Britain, Lessing, despite her reputation as an internationally-acclaimed writer, seems to be becoming more invisible with age’ (57). In order to understand Lessing’s connected aims in tackling the subject of aging and gender in The Diaries and adopting the pseudonym we need to be aware of what was happening to her reputation in the early 1980s and

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also to think about the literary field at that time. In 1983, when The Diary of a Good Neighbour first appeared under the name Jane Somers, Doris Lessing was 64, four years older than the official retirement age for women and roughly half way between the ages of Janna (her narrator) and Maudie. Earlier that same year she had completed her sequence of five science fiction novels Canopus in Argos: Archives. Her move away from realism and into science fiction had been at best controversial and at worst extremely unpopular, as she states in the preface to The Diaries: ‘some reviewers complained they hated my Canopus series, why didn’t I write realistically, the way I used to do before: preferably The Golden Notebook over again’ (5). What is interesting here is the fact that many critics have taken this comment to mean that The Diaries marks a return to realism (Whittaker; Maslen). Yet it would seem that if this is a return it is an extremely complex and perverse one: The Diaries is about as realist as The Golden Notebook. In fact, as is also true of that novel, Lessing makes use of a number of metafictional techniques in order to ‘stage’ her ‘realism’ for the reader. Her intention is to question the commercial constraints that push women authors of a certain age towards certain kinds and genres of literary production and to challenge the association between realism, ‘authenticity’ and women’s writing. She does this in full knowledge of the limitations and problems (but also attractions for women writers) of realism as a form and anticipates many women novelists’ turn away from realism and towards other modes and genres such as magic realism, gothic and postmodernism. In terms of the literary field in the early to mid-1980s, it is worthy of note that Margaret Atwood and Jeannette Winterson were yet to publish The Handmaid’s Tale and Oranges are not the Only Fruit (which both appeared in 1985) and that Angela Carter would publish Nights at the Circus the following year. Three extremely significant feminist texts which adopt elements of science fiction, fantasy and gothic and question the relation between fact and fiction/ history and literature appeared after Lessing’s experiment with pseudonymous publication. In terms of prize culture in the United Kingdom, The Booker Prize for 1983 went to J. M. Coetzee for Life and Times of Michael K. and in 1984 it went to Anita Brookner for Hotel du Lac, apparently just the kind of modest middle-aged feminine novel that Lessing is satirizing. Lessing herself was nominated in 1981 for The Sirian Experiments, the third volume in her Canopus series and again in 1985 for The Good Terrorist, her dry and satirical examination of a woman’s involvement with a left-wing splinter group, but she did not win for either her science fiction or her social realism. It might therefore be claimed that in writing The Diaries and adopting the pseudonym Lessing wanted in her own way to

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test out issues of gender and genre, particularly by stretching the limits of realism and challenging the supposition that it is the appropriate genre for older women novelists to use. The first element of Lessing’s self-conscious ‘staging’ of realism in The Diaries is, obviously, the adoption of the diary form. The Diaries begins with the narrator’s ‘summing-up of about four years’ (13). In this section she tells us briefly about her life before meeting Maudie and their first few meetings. She then decides, ‘Now I am going to write day by day, if I can’ (38), although finding the time to write becomes more difficult as the text progresses and Janna states that she often has to choose between writing and grooming her body, clothes and flat. Within the text, Janna often attempts to write from the perspective of someone else, usually Maudie, to think herself into her consciousness, or to record what she imagines a day in her life might be like. She also records from memory conversations with Maudie, usually Maudie’s memories of her earlier life. This focus on various forms of life writing – the diary and the auto/biography being prominent among them – suggests a number of things. First, it makes clear Lessing’s wish to acknowledge the importance of those supposedly ‘minor’ forms of writing. Second, she wants to alert readers to the gendering of such forms: to make clear their association with gendered notions of authenticity. Third, the ‘fictive’ or ‘self-conscious’ artfulness of life-writing (rather than its transparent reflection of reality) is stressed in order to question how we define realism in literature and highlight its inevitable exclusions. Lessing has said of her own experience of writing the first volume of her autobiography: So, when you are shaping an autobiography, just as when you shape a novel, you have to decide what to leave out. Novels are given shape by leaving out. Autobiographies have to have a shape, and they can’t be too long. Just as with a novel, you have choice: you have to choose. Things have to be left out. I had far too much material for the autobiography. Yet it should be like life, sprawling, big, baggy, full of false starts, loose ends, people you meet once and never think of again, groups of people you meet for an evening or a week and never see again. And so as you write your autobiography it has to have a good deal in common with a novel. It has a shape: the need to make choices dictates that. In short, we have a story. What doesn’t fit into the story, the theme, gets cut out. (‘Writing Autobiography’ 98–9) In other words, the autobiography incorporates elements of selection and narrative momentum just as the novel form does.

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Lessing’s use of a first-person narrator is also part of an attempt to make the reader question the status of The Diaries as a realist text, partly because it is intimately connected with the adoption of the pseudonym. Lessing has used the first person relatively infrequently in her novels and commented in the preface that it might be liberating to do so (5). Her strategy here was to satirize the unthinking conflation of the narrator with the author in the reading and promotion of realist texts (particularly those written by women) by insisting on the similarities between the narrator, Janna and the supposed author, Jane Somers. This was achieved by stating on the book jacket that ‘Jane Somers’ was the pseudonym of ‘a well-known woman journalist’, which led, as Lessing explains, to the novel being reviewed in women’s magazines rather than the broadsheets (7–8). The novel is more than superficially affected by the choice of narrator. Lessing comments: ‘It was more than a question of using the odd turn of phrase or an adjective to suggest a woman journalist’ (6). Janna’s conservative, image-conscious, consumerist values pervade the novel even though she has to reassess them once she meets Maudie. Of course, Janna is herself an author of other texts in other genres than the diaries. While keeping the diary she also writes magazine articles for Lilith and plans and writes a historical novel called The Milliners of Marylebone, which is a heavily romanticized version of Maudie’s life-story. (Janna writes: ‘Oh, I know only too well why we need our history prettied up. It would be intolerable to have the long heavy weight of the truth there, all grim and painful’ [149].) She plans a romantic fiction novel called Gracious Lady about a Victorian lady philanthropist and considers writing a critical book called The Contribution of Boredom to Art. She has apparently nearly finished ‘another serious sociological-type book called Real and Apparent Structures’ (172) and a book called Fashion Changes. When Maudie goes into hospital Janna plans a book on the lives of the ward maids. The sheer extent of her productivity is surely some kind of ironic joke on Lessing’s part. During the course of the novel Janna works full time for Lilith, which often involves trips abroad to fashion shows, cares for Maudie and begins to do the same for other elderly women as the novel progresses, writes her diary and produces these other works, both academic and fictional. Of course work (or production of all kinds) is the subject of all this writing. Of the novel she plans about the ward maids in hospital, Janna writes: I want to write about these ward maids, the Spanish or the Portugese or Jamaican or Vietnamese girls who work for such long hours, and who

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earn so very little, and who keep families, bring up children, and send money home to relatives in Southeast Asia or some little village in the Algarve or the heart of Spain. These women are taken for granted. The porters are paid well in comparison; they go about the hospital with the confidence that goes with, I would say, not being tired. I know one thing, these women are tired. They are tired. They are so tired they dream of being allowed to get into bed and to stay there sleeping for weeks. They all have the same look, of a generalized anxiety, that I recognize; it comes from just keeping on top of things . . . How do I recognize this look? For I cannot remember seeing it before. I have read about it? No, I think it comes from Maudie. (248) The fact that Janna ‘has not read about’ the look of anxiety and tiredness that accompanies these women’s work emphasizes the absences in the literature that Janna is involved in consuming and producing. She comments that ‘that is what I would like to write, but a novel of this kind is hardly the same task as one about those gallant milliners or the sentimental lady’ (249). A few pages later, reading the newly published Milliners of Marylebone to herself, she thinks: ‘How I did enjoy making Maudie’s relentless life something gallantly light-hearted, full of pleasant surprises . . . Maudie would love her life, as reconstructed by me’ (252). Having sanitized Maudie’s life in the low-brow women’s genre of romantic fiction, it could be argued that even though she fails to write her novel about the lives of ward maids, saying that ‘Reality is clearly too much for me’ (317), The Diaries itself provides just the kind of ‘reality’ about women’s work that other genres or modes fail to accommodate. Clearly Lessing is attempting to consider the relationship between gender, genre, gendered work of all kinds and literary culture. Novelist Maggie Gee, discussing her experience of the contemporary marketplace in 1998, remarks: [M]y books are all very different from each other, and I have noticed that those of my books which deal with war or murder, which can be crudely categorised as male topics, receive far more attention and literary respect than those which deal with families or children or love or sex. Yet for me these are all great themes, themes from which you can make serious literary works, themes which demand the same careful attention to structure and form and style. Nevertheless, if I write a book about love, it is very likely to be reviewed in company with other books by women, and in a particular way. If there is ‘love interest’ in the foreground of a work by a woman, reviewers cannot see what else is there; immediately the book is

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categorised as women’s romance. The act of reviewing is too often an act of domination or colonisation, and critics start to map their territory by categorising consciously or unconsciously in terms of gender. (Gee and Appignanesi 173) In a suggestive metaphor comparing reviewing to colonial categorization of subordinate cultures and peoples (that can be instructively compared with Bourdieu’s conception of the ‘permeable frontiers’ of the literary field), Gee suggests that women’s writing about domestic and emotional labour is often unthinkingly conflated with the category of ‘popular’ fiction and reviewed as such. Certainly, part of the intention of Lessing’s hoax was to test whether ‘Jane Somers’, an author whose authorial identity was already deemed ‘lowbrow’ (as a well-known woman journalist whose previous novels had been big-selling romances [Preface to Diaries 8]), could break down the border between popular and ‘literary’ fiction. The hoax thus suggests questions about gender and definitions of art that are explored by Mary Eagleton in Figuring the Woman Author in Contemporary Fiction. Eagleton draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s distinction between the aesthetic disposition, ‘the capacity to consider in and for themselves, as form rather than function’ (Distinction 3), and the popular aesthetic, ‘based on the affirmation of the continuity between art and life, which implies the subordination of form to function’ (Distinction 4). Eagleton claims that what distinguishes contemporary women’s writing is its refusal of this opposition (46–8). This involves not merely a revaluing of the popular but a challenge to the border between popular and dominant, lowbrow and highbrow. It also incorporates the idea that women’s work of all kinds can have a status as art and that usefulness can co-exist with an object’s status as an art form. More recently, other contemporary women writers have also examined how the border between the popular and the literary gets constructed and policed in relation to gender, with particular reference to questions of form and ideas about authenticity. Maggie Gee continues her discussion of women’s writing in the marketplace by claiming that ‘women writers suffer from a lack of attention to style and even more particularly to form. Form is something that critics apparently only expect to find in the work of male literary writers . . . Women “write about” – by which I mean that reviewers look first at our subject matter. Men simply “write” – a primary, literary activity’ (Gee and Appignanesi 173–4). Moving on from Bourdieu’s point about the absence of attention to form in the popular aesthetic, Gee makes the important point that questions of style and form get ignored in reviewers’ assessments of women’s fiction. Clearly this is something that happened in reviewers and critics’ responses to The Diaries (which were read, as we have

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already seen, as marking a welcome, if somewhat naïve return to realism once Lessing’s authorship was acknowledged). It is also something that has happened in response to Lessing’s oeuvre more generally. In her discussion of frequently used negative terms for Lessing’s style, Gayle Greene suggests that her writing has often been seen as ‘turgid, prolix, polemical, preachy, and flat-footed’ (Doris Lessing [italics in original] 31). Absence of stylistic experimentalism or ‘the formal’ in women’s writing does not, however, always accompany the equation of the authorial persona with the narrator. Where the ‘absence’ of style or form is a feature of the popular, the conflation of author and narrator (and the concomitant commodification of authenticity) tends to happen more in assessments of ‘literary’ fiction. As Lisa Appignanesi explains, it is often easier to resist the call for and constraints of authenticity when writing popular commercial fiction. She explains her decision to write in popular genres in precisely these terms: ‘one of the differences between literary and popular fiction . . . is this: that in literary fiction writers seek an authentic voice. I on the other hand, write in order to play out a masquerade’ (Gee and Appignanesi 182). It is striking that pseudonymous publication is often associated with ‘serious’ writers ‘slumming it’ in genre fiction, as if it provides an escape from the constraints of writing within the framework of authenticity and the limitations of ‘writing from experience’. By making Janna a prolific author, who apparently writes serious academic books and romantic fiction as well as the diary we are reading (which also, of course, is a biography of Maudie Fowler), Lessing attempts to refuse distinctions between the popular and the dominant aesthetic. She also points out how gendered those distinctions are and how heavily they are policed by commercial literary culture. For Janna, this is all writing and it is all work. Those often unvalued genres associated with women, such as romantic fiction, the diary and the autobiography, may have more to say about women’s lives and work, more that is real, in fact, than the kinds of realism readers might expect from an elderly woman writer such as Doris Lessing. Lessing points out the things that the mode of literary realism tends to exclude (e.g. the body, the abject, the aging process, domestic and emotional labour of many kinds). In doing so, she makes us rethink realism as a transparently authentic mode of expression appropriate for elderly women writers’ reproduction of their lives. With almost flagrant exaggeration, Lessing seems to be saying: ‘If you want realism then this is what it means for countless elderly women’. It makes for a disturbing read. In conclusion, then, it seems apparent that the strategies Lessing has used in the content, form and publication of The Diaries of Jane Somers are

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intimately connected in order to ask pertinent questions about authorship, commercial literary culture, aging and gender. The ambivalence and blurring of names in and around the novel makes this point clear. Jane is known by everyone as Janna but the text is published using the name ‘Jane Somers’. Many critics (e.g. Greene, ‘The Dairies’; Tiger; Wallace) have taken Lessing’s assertion that she based Jane Somers on her mother (Preface to Diaries 6) to suggest the text’s unresolved concerns about independence from the maternal figure. However, Maudie is, as Diana Wallace has suggested (46), perhaps a better maternal substitute since Lessing’s mother’s middle name was Maud. More importantly, however, Lessing uses the issue of the ‘pseudo/naming’ of the characters and author of the text to ask questions about gender and authorship, reflecting on her detachment from her own surname thus: ‘After all, it is the third name I’ve had: the first, Tayler, being my father’s; the second, Wisdom (now try that one on for size!), my first husband’s; and the third my second husband’s’ (Preface to Diaries 6). When asked why there had been so little promotion of The Diary of a Good Neighbour, the American publisher responded that ‘there was nothing to promote, no ‘personality’, no photograph, no story’ (‘Preface’ to Diaries 8). The Jane Somers hoax allowed Lessing to cross the borders of the authorial persona; in doing so she was at the forefront of an increasing body of work by both writers and critics that examines the relationship between gender, authorship and commercial literary culture. In setting up the hoax, Lessing contends that the cult of the celebrity author is in fact profoundly gendered and ageist, pushing older women writers towards the repetitious reproduction of realist novels that sit comfortably with reader’s expectations and glamourizing young women writers in somewhat conventional ways. Frances Wilson, writing in The Guardian on the subject of author photos, claims that ‘the woman writer must be able to do more than spin a sentence together; she must also give good photo’ (3). The contrast between Lessing’s publicity photos and those of younger women writers makes for instructive viewing. Lessing’s first public appearance after winning the Nobel Prize was at London’s South Bank, where she was interviewed by Hermione Lee. According to The Guardian’s coverage of this event, the interview turned to the issue raised in the Nobel lecture of the ‘space’, ‘soul’ or ‘place’ that writers need in order to write. Lessing said she was ‘desperately sorry’ for younger writers who ‘must tout their wares almost as they write them’. While acknowledging that she herself was participating in this culture of literary celebrity, when asked by someone in the audience what her writing self was like, she replied: ‘Why should I talk about her? She’s silent’.2

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Notes 1

2

Doris Lessing’s Nobel lecture, then entitled ‘A Hunger for Books’ was delivered on Friday 7 December at the Swedish Academy, Stockholm, by Nicholas Pearson, Doris Lessing’s publisher in the United Kingdom. It was published in The Guardian, in the Review section on Saturday, 8 December 2007. The text of the lecture can also be read on the Nobel Prize website, although the lecture has been retitled ‘On Not Winning the Nobel Prize’. The website states that ‘the Nobel lecture has been changed according to the wish of the author’. Please see http://nobelprize. org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2007/lessing-lecture.html. This account of Lee’s interview with Lessing by ‘AE’ appeared in The Guardian on 26 January 2008. It can be found under the title ‘Question Time’ at: http://books. guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2246873,00.html

Works Cited ‘AE’, ‘Question Time’. Guardian, 26 Jan 2008. http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/ story/0,,2246873,00.html [Web. 20 March 2008]. Agatucci, Cora. ‘Breaking from the Cage of Identity: Doris Lessing and The Diaries of Jane Somers.’ Redefining Autobiography in Twentieth-Century Women’s Fiction: An Essay Collection. Eds. Janice Morgan and Colette T. Hall. New York: Garland, 1991. pp. 45–56. Barthes, Roland. ‘The Death of the Author’. Image-Music-Text. Ed. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana, 1977. Berg, Mari-Ann. ‘Toward Creative Understanding: Bakhtin and the Study of Old Age In Literature’. Journal of Aging Studies, 10.1 (1996), 15–26. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984. — ‘The Field of Cultural Production; or, the Economic World Reversed’. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Ed. Randal Johnson. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993. pp. 30–73. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge, 1990. Eagleton, Mary. Figuring the Woman Author in Contemporary Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Foucault, Michel. ‘What is an Author?’ Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. Ed. David Lodge. London: Longman, 1988. pp. 197–210. Gardiner, Judith Kegan. Rhys, Stead, Lessing, and the Politics of Empathy. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. Gee, Maggie and Lisa Appignanesi. ‘The Contemporary Writer: Gender and Genre’. Writing: A Woman’s Business. Women, Writing and the Marketplace. Eds. Judy Simons and Kate Fullbrook. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1998. pp. 172–82. Greene, Gayle. ‘The Diaries of Jane Somers: Doris Lessing, Feminism, and the Mother’. Narrating Mothers: Theorizing Maternal Subjectivities. Eds. Brenda O. Daly and Maureen T. Reddy. Knoxville: Tennessee UP, 1991. pp. 139–56.

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— Doris Lessing: The Poetics of Change. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 1994. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London: Routledge, 2001. Krasner, James. ‘Accumulated Lives: Metaphor, Materiality, and the Homes of the Elderly’. Literature and Medicine, 24.2 (2005), 209–30. Lessing, Doris. The Diaries of Jane Somers. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. —‘A Hunger for Books’. Guardian, 8 Dec 2007. http://books.guardian.co.uk/ review/story/0,,2223780,00.html [Web. 20 March 2008]. — ‘On Not Winning the Nobel Prize’. Nobelprize.org. 7 Dec 2007. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2007/lessing-lecture.html [Web. 20 March 2008]. — ‘Writing Autobiography’. Time Bites. London: Fourth Estate, 2004. pp. 90–103. Maslen, Elizabeth. Doris Lessing. Plymouth: Northcote House, 1994. McDermott, Sinead. ‘Notes on the Afterlife of Feminist Criticism’. PMLA, 121.5 (2006), 1729–34. Mullan, John. Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature. London: Faber and Faber, 2007. Nolan, Maggie and Carrie Dawson. ‘Introduction: “Who’s Who? Mapping Hoaxes and Imposture in Australian Literature.”’ Australian Literary Studies, 21.3 (2004), v–xx. Port, Cynthia. ‘“None of it adds up”: Economies of Aging in The Diary of a Good Neighbour’. Doris Lessing Studies, 24.1–2 (2004), 30–5. Rege, Josna. ‘Introduction: The Child is Mother of the Woman: Exchange Between Age and Youth in Doris Lessing’. Doris Lessing Studies, 24.1–2 (2004), 3–7. Saunders, David and Ian Hunter. ‘Lessons from the “Literatory”: How to Historicise Authorship’. Critical Inquiry, 17 (1991), 479–509. Simons, Judy and Kate Fullbrook. Eds. Writing: A Woman’s Business. Women, Writing and the Marketplace. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1998. Squires, Claire. Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Takolander, Maria and David McCooey. ‘Fakes, Literary Identity and Public Culture’. Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 3 (2004), 57–66. Tiger, Virginia. ‘Ages of Anxiety: The Diaries of Jane Somers’. Spiritual Exploration in the Works of Doris Lessing. Ed. Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis. Westport, Co: Greenwood Press, 1999. pp. 1–16. Vice, Sue. ‘Helen Darville, The Hand that Signed the Paper: Who is ‘Helen Demidenko?’ Scandalous Fictions: The Twentieth-Century Novel in The Public Sphere. Eds. Jago Morrison and Susan Watkins. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. pp. 172-186. Wallace, Diana. ‘“Women’s Time”: Women, Age and Inter-Generational Relations in Doris Lessing’s The Diaries of Jane Somers.’ Studies in the Literary Imagination, 39: 2 (2006), 43–59. Watkins, Susan. ‘“Grande Dame” or “New Woman”: Doris Lessing and the Palimpsest’. LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, 17.3–4 (2006), 243–62. Whittaker, Ruth. Doris Lessing. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988. Wilson, Frances. ‘Facing the Facts’. Guardian, 15 Oct 2005, p. 3.

Chapter 6

(Not Such) Great Expectations: Unmaking Maternal Ideals in The Fifth Child and We Need to Talk about Kevin Ruth Robbins Leeds Metropolitan University, UK

As Adrienne Rich amply demonstrated in Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1977), there are many gaps between the ideal of maternity as it is represented in our culture, and the actual experience of the maternal as a process and a series of relationships engaged in by real women and their real children. Famously in Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations’ ode, the dramatic impetus of the text is to idealize birth, and to see the process of growth as a decline from the perfection of that transcendent moment; this is a male view of the process, and presumably a male view that is only possible because the poet experienced giving birth as neither participant nor as close observer. The mother, as Tess Cosslett has observed, is absent here: Wordsworth’s birth myth, she writes, ‘excludes any mention of woman’s physical role in giving birth – his child arrives direct on earth with no female intermediary’ (146). ‘[T]railing clouds of glory do we come/ From God who is our home’ (Wordsworth 64–5) is a kind of ‘authorized version’ of birth, sanitized for the purposes of poetry, presenting the aesthetics of the closed body, and dramatizing birth and mothering as a much neater genre than it probably is. This is typical of the western economy of aesthetics in which, as Lynda Nead puts it: ‘The forms, conventions and poses of art have worked metaphorically to shore up the female body – to seal orifices and to prevent marginal matter from transgressing the boundary dividing the inside of the body and the outside, the self from the space of the other’ (6). But mothers, perhaps, see and feel things differently. The distinction between self and other, for instance, in pregnancy and childbirth, is far from secure. Moreover, absent from the ode are the often gory details – the

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trails of blood and mucous and other matter, and the physical pain – which accompany pretty much any ‘real’ birth, and the mess of any child’s early years: the poem’s move is from the material to the transcendent to the extent that both the material (matter) and the maternal are excised. In both contrast and comparison, in Yeats’ poem ‘The Second Coming’, the female who gives birth is also absent; but the birth itself is figured as a monstrosity. It is not a child or cherub who will be born and celebrated but a ‘rough beast’, which ‘slouches towards Bethlehem to be born’ (21–2) and may yet signal the end of the world. The positions these quotations enact suggest that the maternal can be not only transcendent and glorious, but conveniently invisible, or conveniently invisible and a matter for blame. Anne Stevenson’ poem ‘Birth’, on the other hand, is both more and less knowing. In her comment that birth is ‘impossible to imagine’ because we cannot know ‘how to expect’ (5), she offers a corrective to masculine rules about genre and gender which undermines the factitious distinction between knowledge/imagination/glory/fear. The aesthetics of the closed body, the authorized versions of bodies and their meanings, usually maleauthored and generally presuming a male gaze, offer extremely inadequate representations of maternal realities. Wordsworth’s view of birth is a historically determined view and for his culture as well as for ours, the details of the physicality of birth are often repressed by both individual women and a society which still needs women to bear children (in both senses of the word to ‘bear’). The generic rules of propriety in poetry are not breached in his poem. For Julia Kristeva, on the other hand, what thinking about the maternal demands is precisely a consideration of the breach of limits, the crossing of boundaries, physical, intellectual and generic. In her meditation on the maternal condition, which includes both pregnancy and parturition, entitled ‘Stabat Mater’ she juxtaposes the ideological weight of the myth of the Virgin Mary1 with a lyrical performance of the self-expression of her own experience of maternity. The two texts-in-one imply both a separation and a conflation of the two elements, typographically signalled, though that conflation is not necessarily comfortable or easy on either writing subject or on the reader because the generic rules are destabilized. The essay becomes personal rather than a performance of the objectivity more usually associated with the essay genre: borders are crossed and rules are broken (‘Stabat’160–86). Similarly, in the earlier book, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Kristeva attempts to theorize the conflict of ideology and experience as a kind of necessary conflict. She takes from anthropologist Mary Douglas the important insight that civilized adulthood is fraught with the danger that the body

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(an object in the world) will threaten the carefully constructed subjectivity that the adult is trained to inhabit. As Douglas puts it: Any structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins. We should expect the orifices of the body to symbolize its especially vulnerable points. Matter issuing from them is marginal stuff of the most obvious kind. Spittle, blood, milk, urine, faeces or tears, simply by issuing forth have traversed the boundary of the body. So also have bodily parings, skin, nails, hair clippings and sweat. (121) The civilized adult who thinks of him or herself as a subject (in control, an agent, competent) is constantly reminded by bodily matter (anything that crosses the borders of the body – faeces, mucous, blood, semen, milk, vomit, ear wax, tears, phlegm) that s/he is also an object in the world. The extended plays on the French word propre (meaning both one’s own, ownership, and cleanliness and propriety) in Powers of Horror suggest that selfhood, subjectivity, is bound up with ownership of the body, control of it in general and especially of its cleanliness. The material that crosses the body is disavowed and repudiated as ‘not my own’ and not clean and, therefore, improper. The recognition in these marginal matters of the self as abject is particularly acute for women in the case of childbirth, for this is the one occasion when that which traverses the body’s limits is not to be regarded as filth or ordure. The complication, of course, is that the product of pregnancy – the baby – valued and beloved, one hopes, is also marked with that bodily matter from the process of its birth: not trailing clouds of glory, indeed, but covered in ‘stuff’, matter, that has to be removed out of sight, and the very memory of which has to be repressed. Lines are drawn under the experience. Few lines are drawn to represent it.2 The literary experience of maternity, whether as glory or as abjection – and more likely a mixture of the two – is filled, I want to suggest, with generic instability. For Kristeva, abjection itself is about the limits of meaning: ‘the abject . . . draws me towards the place where meaning collapses’, she writes (Powers 2). Women have expectations of texts and of lives which are culturally derived. They have great expectations of the experience of childbirth; the experience itself, however, may well undermine those horizons of expectation. Genre does the same; it makes meaning because it guides interpretation through appeals to expectations. And by the by, genre and gender are of course related words, and more than just etymologically. What I want to argue here, then, is that in two relatively contemporary texts – Lessing’s The Fifth Child (1988) and Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk

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about Kevin (2003) – the writers investigate and negotiate the ‘problem’ of maternity. Using narrative structures which unsettle the reader, their texts imply that neither version of the maternal institution as ideologically constructed ideal nor the real experience of motherhood (neither the transcendent narrative nor the blood and guts of another kind of narrative of the process of birth, nor yet the birth narrative focused on the product of reproduction, neither the cherub nor the monster) are adequate representations. The mother/child story, when it is told from the mother’s point of view rather than the father’s, offers a corrective vision that modifies the cultural ideal. It breaks the frame, crosses generic boundaries; it messes with genre, with ‘mess’ perhaps being the operative word. In itself, however, the mother’s narrative does not tell the whole story either, and we must beware of trusting the mothers in these tales too much. The child in these novels – and neither child speaks unmediated on its own behalf – is at least unpredictable, and possibly monstrous, and it/he does not fit neatly into the stories we tell to ensure the propagation of the species and/or the future payment of our pensions (for the (re)production of labour is both biological and economic). The child does not ask to be born. And the mother does not expect what she gets. Nor, in the case of these two novels, does the reader. Maternity or reproduction, in other words, in these two books, produces conflicts in genre, in ideology, in economics and, in their representations of problem or monstrous children, they both drastically call into question the liberal ideals of family in the West. Readings of The Fifth Child often emphasize genre as a major issue in the interpretation of this text, which is no surprise, for Doris Lessing is a notoriously unpredictable novelist who has always tested generic boundaries in individual works and in her oeuvre as a whole. As Jeannette King notes, The Fifth Child incorporates ‘folklore elements in the idea of a changeling child . . . it has been called a “horror story” by some critics’ (107). In an interview with Lessing, Claire Tomalin suggested to the author that it also had elements of the parable about it – and Lessing did not disagree; she also noted her attraction to the folkloric accounts of what she terms ‘the little people’; and she cited two sources that were more immediate: the account by an archaeologist of meeting a girl-child who resembled a Neanderthal; and a letter in a newspaper from a woman who had, after many ‘perfectly satisfactory marvellous children’, given birth to a child she identified as ‘“this little devil, this horrible imp, which had ruined the family”’ (Tomalin 176). The identification of the text as parable or folklore or even fairy story is clearly suggested by the narrative voice, which is deceptively simple and

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paratactic, and which is distanced from the events it narrates and which in turn distances the audience from any position of empathy with Harriet and David, the couple at the heart of the story, or their child. This has the effect of rendering their story as archetypal rather than individual. Although there are local, historically specific details, the novel is narrated at a distance, as it were, from the figures it describes, as in this brief passage in the aftermath of Ben’s birth: He was not a pretty baby. He did not look like a baby at all. He had a heavy-shouldered hunched look, as if he were crouching there as he lay. His forehead sloped from his eyes to his crown. [. . .] He opened his eyes and looked straight up into his mother’s face. [. . .] She had been waiting to exchange looks with this creature [. . .] but there was no recognition there. [. . .] she heard herself say nervously, though she tried to laugh, ‘He’s like a troll, or a goblin or something.’ (60–1) Written largely in short, staccato sentences, and in sentences which, even when they are long, refuse the grammatical and philosophical resources of complexity (the enabling of connected, logical thought, for instance), the narrative appears merely to describe the events of the story with no explicit judgement of them or of the characters who live them. It refuses the comfort of identification. Indeed, it could well be the case that we are asked to read the novel with the same lack of emotional affect with which Ben, the eponymous fifth child, experiences his world or in the same way as his mother experiences her relationship with him. The sense of horror comes, then, not only from the events, which have their own horrific side (the killing of a pet dog, for instance, and the far more shocking treatment of Ben himself when he is ‘put away’ in a ‘home’) but from the implication that we can imagine no appropriate way of treating this child: our allegedly civilized values can get no purchase on the particulars of this situation, and the novel tests to destruction the liberal values of its characters and – presumably – its readers. Emmanuel Levinas argued that the ethical relationship is a face-to-face relationship, meaning not necessarily a literal meeting of glances, but a metaphorical one in which the self seeks and finds itself in the face of the other (37–41). But in The Fifth Child Ben refuses to meet his mother’s gaze, and everyone else, at least according to Harriet, looks away. At the same time, however, the basic genres of folklore and parable have their roots in the dissemination of practical wisdom and morality. They usually imply easily legible messages, where each part can be interpreted

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and securely located in meaning, as Walter Ong has suggested, rendering narrative, narrator and recipient ‘safe’, protected by genre. That ease of interpretation is not in this case forthcoming, unsettling any security in our knowledge of the kind of book we are reading. And as The Fifth Child could just as easily be read as a straightforwardly realistic account of a family rendered dysfunctional by an abnormal, not to say monstrous, child, the generic markers of the parable are doubly unstable. For Elizabeth Maslen, for instance, this is a realist novel (1). The problem the reader has is that she does not know what genre she is in, does not know how or what to expect, and therefore cannot decide how to respond. An additional complication is that the story is narrated in the third person, but with particular focus on the reactions and thoughts of Harriet, and she does not know what genre she is in either. When we first meet her it is in the setting of an office Christmas party, in the early 1960s, at a moment when female employment, especially combined with motherhood, was an issue that produced strong reactions in both pro and anti directions: that Christmas party, for instance, takes place in the very precise historical moment of the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963 in which Friedan had identified the obscure longings and lacks of the stayat-home-mothers of the post-war period. In the novel, the 1960s have not yet begun to swing, but the attitudes of the generation that had just gained access to reliable contraception and which was clearly leaving behind the rigours of post-war austerity, were in favour of a world of personal and consumer choices, including for women, the choice to work at economically productive labour rather than to confine (significant word) themselves to the biological labour of reproduction. Harriet does not belong here, at this party and at this time, it is implied. Her appearance is distinctly soft-focus, perhaps even rose-tinted, and she is explicitly (and incongruously) linked to the romantic impressionist paintings of gardens by Claude Monet in the midst of a very urban London party: From across the room . . . Harriet was a pastel blur. As in an Impressionist picture [. . .] she seemed merged with her surroundings. She stood near a great vase of dried grasses and leaves and her dress was something flowery. The focusing eye then saw curly dark hair which was unfashionable . . . blue eyes, soft but thoughtful . . . lips rather too firmly closed. (8) That pastoral pastel image is obviously at odds with the context of the nearly swinging 1960s, both immediately and more generally. And in her early

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experiences of marriage and maternity, where she embraces the conventional domestic role with enthusiasm, Harriet remains ‘unfashionable’, out of her time, just as Lessing implies that Ben is, in a rather different, more fundamental and genetic way. Anachronistic as she is, Harriet’s point of view is not necessarily reliable. The view of those others who observe her fifth child – the health professionals who deal with pregnancy and parturition and later the teachers in his school – is that Ben exists more or less within the realms of the ‘normal’, and there are certainly hints that it is the expectations of class, specifically middle-class educational and social aspirations, at least as much as any biological issue that sets him apart from his siblings and peers. As Harriet’s mother says to the battered parents: ‘You two are going to have to face it. Ben has got to go into an institution.’ ‘But he’s normal,’ said Harriet, grim. ‘The doctor says he is.’ ‘He may be normal for what he is. But he is not normal for what we are.’ (79) Beautifully double-edged, that exchange, because it is impossible to say whether Dorothy is talking about biology or culture in her appeal to the norms she inhabits. We cannot decide whether Ben is meant to be a goblin, a troll, an alien, a mentally disabled child or just a naughty one. Harriet’s dislike of her child through a difficult pregnancy is extreme and the question of cause and effect is not really resolved for us – is the child abnormal because she dislikes him, or does she dislike him because he is abnormal? Moreover, with successive pregnancy, Harriet has found the going physically harder – is the child a physical emanation of an exhausted mother in a neo-Lamarckian view of genetic inheritance? Or is he the result of her abuse of the tranquilizers she takes during pregnancy to quiet the foetus, driven to drugs by desperation at the fifth month of her pregnancy when the foetus is unusually active and even violent? ‘Have you ever had a case like this before?’ Harriet sounded sharp, peremptory, and the doctor gave her an annoyed look. ‘I’ve certainly seen energetic babies before, he said shortly, and when she demanded, ‘At five months? Like this?’ he refused to meet her – was dishonest, as she felt it. ‘I’ll give you a sedative,’ he said. For her. But she thought of it as something to quiet the baby. (49, my italics)

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The causes are not given explanations; only the effects of the foetus and then the child’s existence are described. Harriet’s emotions, italicized in the passage above, control her response to the child, are all-embracing, but are also, perhaps, merely idiosyncratic. As in many other monster narratives, the child Ben is afforded no interiority, and a vocabulary that would render any subjective self severely limited: ‘poor Ben’ he says of himself in virtually his only articulate utterance. In contrast, and just as disturbingly, the monstrous child in We Need to Talk about Kevin is frighteningly articulate, though unlike Frankenstein’s monstrous progeny, he is not permitted to speak outside his mother’s framing narrative. This is not a surprise. Kevin is the child of an extremely articulate mother. The construction of the novel is very different from The Fifth Child. It is narrated entirely by Eva in the aftermath of the terrible crimes that her child commits in a first-person narrative couched as a series of letters to her husband, the child’s father. The epistolary form contrasts with the appeal to an archetypal folkloric tradition that Lessing deploys. The epistolary novel is a genre that focuses absolutely on the interiority of the writing persona. Where the parable or fairytale are apparently (though not actually) universal, the epistolary fiction is intensely local, individualistic and historically determined, just as the subjectivity it attempts to describe must also be, and this is even more strongly marked in a novel where the correspondent to Eva’s story does not reply. Eva’s child, Kevin Khatchadourian has become a mass murderer, a high-school killer in the manner of the Columbine murderers, with the twist that he kills his victims with a crossbow, not a gun. Readers know this appalling fact from very early in the text, though there are further gruesome horrors to be revealed, and which are only uncovered in the last few pages. His crime is a contemporary crime; and his mother’s response to it draws on the resources of autobiography as therapy, a mode that is supremely of this moment when the misery memoirs of abused childhoods and terminal illnesses have enjoyed an unprecedented vogue.3 Trading on the paradox of the apparent credibility of the eye-witness statement which is also embedded in suspicions about its motivations, Eva may well be leading us up the garden path, producing a similarly unsettling effect on readers as Lessing does by very different means. In contrast to the anachronistic Harriet and her son, then, Eva is aggressively a woman of her time, taking the gains of second-wave feminism for granted and seeking to resolve her problems in the contemporary manner. Her job, a successful travel business that she has established herself,

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demands that her finger is on the pulse of the zeitgeist: without that sense of the moment, she would have no business to run. Unlike Harriet, Eva has no dream of maternity. She believes in ‘having it all’, and puts the satisfaction of her own desires at the forefront of her mind – desires that are material, but also openly sexual.4 She is a middle-class American woman, welleducated, articulate and a successful business woman, married to her allAmerican husband. They have the choices that material affluence can bring, and for a number of years, they choose not to have children. Thus, early in the novel, Eva recalls the reasons for feeling that motherhood was not for her in a list of devastating honesty: the reasons include the purely personal – Eva is bored by small children; she doesn’t want to get fat or suffer from varicose veins; she dislikes the possibility of her own abjection. They also include more social, economic and cultural reasons – she is an entrepreneur whose career depends on travel, and she lists both ‘social demotion’ and ‘curtailment of travel’ as reasons why she should never have bothered to have a child (Kevin 30). Nowhere on that list is the actual ‘worst’ thing that happens, which is that her child is a killer. Addressing her absent husband, she writes, with very significant italics: Franklin, I was absolutely terrified of having a child. Before I got pregnant, my visions of child-rearing . . . all seemed like pictures of someone else. I dreaded confrontation with what could prove a closed, stony nature, my own selfishness and lack of generosity, the thick, tarry powers of my own resentment. (37, original emphasis) And when she realizes that she has forgotten her diaphragm before Kevin is born, she notes that it is dangerous to be pregnant: ‘just about any stranger could have turned up nine months later. We might as well have left the door unlocked’ (60). Where Harriet is exhausted yet contented by multiple pregnancies, Eva is resistant. There is a scene which recalls, perhaps deliberately, the moment in Lawrence’s The Rainbow, where the heavily pregnant Anna Brangwen dances for her own delight as a pregnant woman and her husband intervenes, resentful of her autonomy. In a modern reprise of this scene, Eva dances to a Talking Heads album, significantly to a track called ‘Psycho Killer’, and her husband returns and stops her, resenting, apparently just as Will Brangwen had 80 years before, the mother’s assertion of separateness from both husband and child, though it could be that he disapproves equally of her choice of song. And unlike Harriet, who in Plath’s

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words is ‘cow-heavy and floral/in her Victorian nightgown’ (157), but satisfied with that lot, Eva is fiercely intelligent and articulate, constantly analysing her situation and her responses to it, and profoundly dissatisfied. The genres she is offered for maternity in all its stages are inadequate and inappropriate; as Anne Stevenson puts it in ‘Birth’, she does not know ‘how to expect’. The models of maternity Eva sees around her – her mentally-ill mother, the all-American efficiency of her mother-in-law, her sister-in-law’s varicose veins, her friends’ descent into baby talk or lamentation when they give birth to their children – all imply that she would not wish to be a mother as they are. Unlike Wordsworth’s poem, of course, her expectations are resolutely downbeat. Her resentment of her first child is physical (she objects to the physical changes she goes through), social (she hates being treated as public property) and emotional (she resents the curtailment of her freedoms). And she pulls no punches in the description of the birth itself concluding her description of it with the comment: ‘In the very instant of his birth I associated Kevin with my own limitations – with not only suffering, but defeat’ (90). Kevin and Ben, once born, seem to share the emotional detachment which makes it impossible for their mothers to love them: both, for example, force the confrontation of the mother with her own abjection by using faeces as a weapon, miring them both rather literally in bodily matter. The mothers in each case feel responsibility but not affection. Ben kills a dog, a cat, and threatens a Down’s-Syndrome baby. Kevin’s crimes in childhood are more insidious, to the extent that his father does not recognize them as crimes, and even readers primed to believe in Eva’s account are suspicious of her interpretations of them. He refuses to speak or be toilet-trained until Eva loses her temper and – accidentally, she tells us, but also angrily – breaks his arm. He encourages other children’s poor behaviour, usually the kind of behaviour that is definitely to the other child’s disadvantage. He refuses to engage with emotional affect or the world of the emotions at all. Thus his mother describes his disengagement from any sense of empathy in relation to his watching of violent films, where she observes him observing violence, with complete indifference: Cinematic carve-ups are only hard to handle if on some level you believe that these tortures are being done to you. . . . But Kevin had discovered the secret: not merely that it wasn’t real, but that it wasn’t him. Over the years I observed Kevin watching decapitations, disembowelments, dismemberments, deoculations and crucifixions, and I never saw him flinch.

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Because he’d mastered the trick. If you decline to identify, slice-and-dice is no more discomfiting than watching your mother prepare beef stroganoff. (171–2, original emphasis) There’s a very nasty clue buried in that passage about one of the things that Kevin will later do: his face-to-face relationship with his sister, his meeting of her glance involves him only in the destruction of the sight of one of her eyes. In prison later he will horrify his mother by playing with the child’s prosthetic eye as if it were a marble. But the real point of this litany of abuse is that Kevin is presented as a person who refuses to be the kind of subject who recognizes the possibility of his own abjection and who therefore has no ethical engagement with the world. The scenes on the screen become meaningless to him – subject/object/abject are one: there is no real face-toface relationship, and there is no possibility of ethics in his absolute detachment. As with The Fifth Child, however, the questions raised in Shriver’s fiction are complex to answer. Trapped as we are in Eva’s consciousness, with no access to Kevin’s interiority (like Ben we don’t get inside his head, though the reasons for this are different), we cannot judge what we are reading – what genre we are in, a disabling of judgement which Shriver quite deliberately manipulates. As she suggested in an article for the Guardian in February 2005, ‘Whether Kevin was innately twisted or was mangled by his mother’s coldness is a question with which the novel struggles, but which it ultimately fails to answer. That verdict is the reader’s job’ (‘Why Ruin Your Life’ 8). We don’t know his motivation, even if we are obsessively exposed to Eva’s. This could, after all, be a horror story because we are reading a story about bad parenting, bad mothering particularly, and thus it could be a tale of family dysfunction rather than one about a monstrous child. Eva tells us that Kevin inflicts but does not feel pain, either physically or emotionally. But we only have her word for it. And there is internal evidence that the novelist is testing her audience’s faith in that narrative voice. On the one hand, Eva is frank about her motivations and emotions: she admits to anger, annoyance, irritation and lack of affection – the multiple faults that might just explain a child’s behaviour but which also prime us to believe that she must be telling the truth since she seems to spare her own amourpropre so little. On the other, what kind of mother allows her ten-year-old son to watch violent movies on TV? What kind of mother breaks her fouryear-old’s arm? Harriet is horrified to discover that ‘she was going to have to control [Ben] through fear’ (107); Eva gets minimal compliance from

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her son through violence, at least when he is very small, and no compliance at all as he gets older. The novel’s rhetoric is one of the sources of its generic discomfort, for we are invited to believe Eva, but we have access to the evidence that makes disbelief an evens bet. The bemused widower doctor in Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot says to himself, somewhat tetchily: Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you, life where things aren’t. I’m not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people’s lives, never your own. (168) The doctor may be right, though neither Lessing’s nor Shriver’s book precisely makes sense of their protagonists’ lives. The effectiveness of these novels is a function of the fact that they focus on the randomness and contingency of life, refusing the comfort of generic patterning. That is not to say that the characters do not seek explanation as a form of consolation, and they are not prevented from hoping that the gap between their expectations (generic, gendered) and their actuality might be minimized. As Eva puts it, her narrative has been written in order to understand where her own responsibility for her son begins and ends: I’m determined to accept due responsibility for every wayward thought, every petulance, every selfish moment, not in order to gather all the blame to myself to admit this is my fault but there, there, precisely there is where I draw a line and on the other side, that, that . . . is not. (84, original emphasis) Eva wants to draw a line, to contain her experience within defined limits, to resist the intellectual equivalents of abjection – chaos, randomness, contingency. The line is not, however, drawn. The laws of genre are unravelled in these texts in part because the laws of subjectivity, including gender, are severely threatened by maternity: mothers cannot know how or what to expect. In the crossing of the body’s borders, many other boundaries are also over-run. The individual is divided; one becomes two; there’s always another side, always, to the narrative, though it is not necessarily made available to the reader, and the interpretation refuses to rest easily within any single defining limit. At the end of both novels, the mothers imagine the futures for their monster children. Harriet expects a future life of petty theft for Ben on the

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margins of society as part of the gang with whom he feels most at home, and fears the effects of this on him. And Eva, having finally admitted that out of ‘desperation or even laziness’ (Kevin 468) that she loves her son, wonders what rough beast will slouch out of prison in five years time: she has no great expectations or hopes. No definitive answer is vouchsafed in either novel. In neither novel, therefore, are the ideals of maternity saved.

Notes 1

2

3

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This myth of the Virgin Mary on which Kristeva meditates is one she derived from reading Marina Warner’s important study of the ideal and divine mother, Alone of All her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976). The book details what might be described as the ‘orthodox’ virgin of maternal femininity and the impossibility of Mary as a role model for actual women who – by their nature – cannot live up to the ideal of both virgin and mother. Tess Cosslett points out that in the early twentieth century, when women writers first attempted to discuss childbirth and its aftermath, they were often met with disgust on the part of the (usually male) critic (1–9). And Charlotte Otten, among others, identifies Anne Sexton’s poem ‘In Celebration of My Uterus’ (1967) as a key moment in the opening up of the subject of childbirth to writing in general and poetry in particular, though readings of the poem often provoked discomfort and distress (Otten xv). Nead’s The Female Nude similarly points out that femininity’s closed body is beloved of art and the open body – particularly the body in parturition – is judged obscene. I have written elsewhere about the ‘fashion’ for narratives of terminal illness – in my book Subjectivity (2005), for instance. The misery memoir, beginning, perhaps in its most modern incarnation in the Anglophone world with Frank McCourt’s 1996 Angela’s Ashes, and continuing with a raft of terrible childhoods, the most notorious of which include Dave Pelzer’s series of autobiographical texts, tends to seek validation, therapeutic outlet and sometimes revenge through publication. A number of high-profile scandals and disputes about the factuality of these texts is part of the context for reading We Need to Talk about Kevin, for the possibility of fabrication is part of what the novel offers us. The phrase ‘having it all’ has become a kind of short hand for the much greater choices and privileges that western women enjoy in the post-1960s period. It means the ability to have a satisfying career alongside a satisfactory domestic life, including the life of the family and bearing children. It is, however, a phrase fraught with difficulties, as in the title of Paula Nicolson’s 2002 book, Having It All? Choices for Today’s Superwoman, where the titular question mark implies the book’s broader argument, that this is an unrealistic goal. Nicolson’s discussion suggests that women are often punished, if in no other way than by exhaustion, for their aspiration to be taken seriously in both the public and the private spheres. Eva will discover that ‘having it all’ means sacrifice: her children do affect her career, demanding that

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she remain at home rather than travel – hers is a travel business so this is not a minor consideration. And to defend herself from a charge of poor parenting in the aftermath of Kevin’s crime, Eva also sacrifices her business to the financial costs of the court action brought against her by the parents of one of Kevin’s victims, so the cost of reproduction is starkly economic as well as emotional.

Works Cited Barnes, Julian. Flaubert’s Parrot. London: Picador, 1984. Rev. edn. 1985. Cosslett, Tess. Women Writing Childbirth: Modern Discourses of Childbirth. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Purity and Taboo. 1966. Rev. ed. London: ARK Books, 1988. Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. Introduction. Anna Qindlen. New York: W. W. Norton, 1963. Rev. edn. 2001. King, Jeanette. Modern Fiction: Doris Lessing. London: Edward Arnold, 1989. Kristeva, Julia. ‘Stabat Mater’ 1983. The Kristeva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. pp. 160–86. —Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. 1980. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Lawrence, D. H. The Rainbow. 1915. Ed. Kate Flint. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008. Lessing, Doris. The Fifth Child. 1988. London: Flamingo, 1993. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. London: Kluwer Academic, 1991. Maslen, Elizabeth. Doris Lessing: Writers and Their Work. Plymouth: Northcote House, 1994. Nead, Lynda. The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality. London: Routledge, 1992. Nicolson, Paula. Having It All? Choices for Today’s Superwoman. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2002. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge, 1980. Otten, Charlotte F. ed. The Virago Book of Birth Poetry. London: Virago, 1993. Pelzer, Dave. My Story: A Child Called It, The Lost Boy, A Man Named Dave. London: Orion, 2002. Plath, Sylvia. Collected Poems. Ed. and Introduction. Ted Hughes. London: Faber and Faber, 1981. Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. 1977. New York: W.W. Norton, 1986. Robbins, Ruth. Subjectivity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Shriver, Lionel. We Need to Talk About Kevin. 2003. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2005. —‘Why ruin your life?’ Guardian. 18 Feb 2005. Comment and Features Section, p. 8. www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/feb/18/gender.uk1 [Web. 30 June 2007].

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Stevenson, Anne. ‘Birth’. The Virago Book of Birth Poetry. Ed. Charlotte Otten. London: Virago, 1993. Tomalin, Claire. Interview with Doris Lessing, ‘Watching the Angry and Destructive Hordes go Past’. Doris Lessing: Conversations. 1988. Ed. Earl G. Ingersoll. New Jersey: Ontario Review Press, 1994, pp. 173–7. Warner, Marina. Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary. 1976. London: Vintage, 1983. Wordsworth, William. ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’. William Wordsworth. The Oxford Authors. Ed. Stephen Gill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Yeats, W. B. ‘The Second Coming’. W. B. Yeats: Selected Poetry. Ed. A. Normal Jeffares. London: Pan Books, 1974.

Chapter 7

Doris Lessing’s Under My Skin: The Autobiography of a Cosmopolitan ‘Third Culture Kid’ Alice Ridout Leeds Metropolitan University, UK

The occasion of Doris Lessing’s Nobel Laureate for Literature generated a range of articles in the press that attempted to summarize her life, categorize her work and ‘place’ Doris Lessing. Motoko Rich and Sarah Lyall’s intentionally awkward opening sentence is exemplary of these attempts and draws attention to the difficulty of the task: ‘Doris Lessing, the Persian-born, Rhodesian-raised and London-residing novelist whose deeply autobiographical writing has swept across continents and reflects her engagement with the social and political issues of her time, won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday’ (‘Doris Lessing’). Their use of three hyphenated words in a row draws attention to Lessing’s position ‘betwixt and between’. Every article I came across that reported Lessing’s Nobel Prize emphasized her border crossings – from Persia to Rhodesia to Britain; from colonial Rhodesia to postcolonial Zimbabwe; from autobiographical fiction to science fiction; and from Communism to Sufism. Like Rich and Lyall, many also discussed Lessing’s ‘engagement with the social and political issues of her time’. That the press coverage of Lessing’s Nobel Prize so repeatedly drew attention to her border crossings and her timeliness, suggests that these are particularly important aspects of Lessing’s work and life. This chapter attempts to deepen our understanding of Lessing’s timely (or untimely) border crossings by identifying her as a ‘Third Culture Kid’ and placing her in the context of recent theories of cosmopolitanism. Describing the contexts in which, as David Harvey has put it, ‘cosmopolitanism is back’, (qtd in Vertovec and Cohen 1), Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen allude to the ‘social, or more intimate personal level’ at which ‘many individuals now seem to be, more than ever, prone to articulate complex

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affiliations, meaningful attachments and multiple allegiances to issues, people, places and traditions that lie beyond the boundaries of their resident nation-state’ (2). Drawing on their own earlier work they identify two groups of people for whom this is particularly true: ‘migrants, members of ethnic diasporas and other transnational communities’ and those ‘who are active in global social movements’ and who therefore ‘orient their politics and identities towards agendas outside, as well as within, their resident nation-states’ (2). As a Third Culture Kid and an ex-Communist, Doris Lessing is a member of both these groups of people and the pertinence of recent theories of cosmopolitanism to her work is yet another example of what the media has repeatedly identified as her ‘timeliness’.1 First published in 1999 as The Third Culture Kid Experience, David C Pollock and Ruth E Van Reken’s book (re-titled Third Culture Kids: The Experience of Growing Up Among Worlds in 2001) is very much of its time in identifying a growing transnational community. The concept of a ‘third culture’ was developed by Ruth Hill Useem during the 1950s and 1960s when she was researching American expatriates in India. The expatriate communities she studied were mainly military and missionary communities who lived separated off from the host culture, housed together by their sponsor organizations. As these expatriates tended to inhabit spaces that were literally between their home and host cultures, the idea that these expatriates were living in a self-created ‘third culture’ (what Useem also termed an ‘interstitial culture’ or ‘culture between cultures’) was an obvious one. The expatriates Useem studied lived on military bases and in missionaries with facilities like shops that imported products from their home countries and schools that offered a similar curriculum to that offered ‘back home’. These spaces could not entirely replicate the home culture, nor completely exclude the host culture that was all around them. Children born into or brought up in these liminal spaces did inhabit a quite specific ‘third culture’. Since then, expatriate communities have increasingly become more integrated with their host countries and this has lead to a questioning of the notion of whether ‘Third Culture Kids’ really do share a ‘third culture’. What can a British person, like myself, born and brought up in and around an American military expatriate community in urban Yokohama, Japan have in common with someone like Doris Lessing, born to British parents in what was Persia and brought up in a settler-farmer community in rural Rhodesia? The research suggests that despite enormous differences in the cultural backgrounds and experiences of ‘Third Culture Kids’, the similarities are even more striking, and the level of identification with the concept of belonging to a global ‘third culture’ is usually extremely high. Although,

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as Vertovec and Cohen are quick to point out, ‘a bit of dabbling in, or desire for, elements of cultural otherness in itself does not indicate a very deep sense of cosmopolitanism’ and it is helpful to differentiate (as Ulf Hannerz does) between ‘true cosmopolitans’ and ‘merely globally mobile people’ (Vertovec and Cohen 8), it is also true that cosmopolitanism understood as an individual’s particular ‘outlook or disposition is largely acquired through experience, especially travel’ (Vertovec and Cohen 13). It is this ‘outlook or disposition’ developed as a result of transnational childhood experiences that Pollock and Van Reken argue in their book is the basis for Third Culture Kids’ commonality with each other. That Lessing is not ‘merely’ a ‘globally mobile’ person but has a deeper commitment to a cosmopolitan outlook is implied by her membership of the Communist party at a time when it seemed to promise a global politics. Improvements in technology and an increase in access to the internet around the world have enabled the concept of the ‘Third Culture Kid’ to develop into a significant online global community which recognizes itself as such. For example, a Facebook group entitled ‘Third Culture Kids Everywhere’ boasts 15,396 members. Related Facebook groups also have high memberships.2 Even the US Department of State gives the term official recognition by including an entire webpage entitled ‘Third Culture Kids’ in its Family Liaison Office webpages.3 It is evident therefore, that although the Third Culture Kids that Pollock and Van Reken explore in their late twentiethcentury publication no longer necessarily inhabit separated-off expatriate communities such as military bases, they increasingly participate in virtual communities based on the shared experience of growing up in a culture of ‘neither/nor’. Like the TCKs Ruth Hill Useem studied in the middle of the twentieth century, contemporary TCKs feel ‘at home’ in neither their parents’ home culture nor the host culture their parents are visiting. So although military and missionary communities were the basis for the ‘third culture’ concept, it has been widely argued, even by Useem herself, that the concept is still a helpful one with which to approach and understand the experiences of children who have grown up outside their parents’ home cultures. Pollock and Van Reken’s clear and helpful definition of a Third Culture Kid is widely accepted and quoted: A Third Culture Kid (TCK) is a person who has spent a significant part of his or her developmental years outside the parents’ culture. The TCK builds relationships to all of the cultures, while not having full ownership in any. Although elements from each culture are assimilated into the

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TCK’s life experience, the sense of belonging is in relationship to others of similar background. (19)4 Thus, the defining aspects of the TCK’s immigrant experiences are that they are still children when they move between cultures and have not, therefore, developed an adult sense of identity within their home cultures but develop an adult identity during this process of moving ‘betwixt and between’ two or more cultures.5 A second important aspect is that there is usually the expectation that they will return ‘home’.6 Unlike immigrant children who often view their challenge as being that of becoming as assimilated as possible as quickly as possible, the TCK is taught to be careful not to feel too at home in the host culture because their real home is actually elsewhere. Finally, it is crucial to note that the term refers to the world’s privileged mobile children.7 Vertovec and Cohen offer a helpful discussion of ‘the common stereotype of cosmopolitans’ as ‘the privileged, bourgeois, politically uncommitted elites’ (6). In his consideration of Robert Pinsky’s phrase – ‘the village of the liberal managerial class’ – Bruce Robbins suggests that identifying this privilege should not be the end of our conversation about this globally mobile group: ‘If cosmopolitanism is indeed the ideology of something like a new global elite, then I want to ask what follows – whether there is a proper tone in which this can be acknowledged, a tone implying that acknowledgement is not the end of the conversation’ (Robbins 16). The privilege of Third Culture Kids is hinted at in the very word ‘kid’ and is even more clearly apparent in the term ‘Military Brat’.8 Lessing’s character, Tommy9 in ‘The Antheap’ demonstrates that this privilege can, in itself, cause TCKs discomfort. Pollock and Van Reken discuss these ideological difficulties in Third Culture Kids. If children lived among extreme poverty in their host countries they can be disgusted and overwhelmed by the consumerism of their home countries when they return.10 In contrast, the child may have become used to having servants and other privileges while abroad and returns home to find life more difficult than it was in the host country. Lessing’s texts from the time of and about her ‘home coming’ to London imply that she had both of these experiences.11 A common critique of cosmopolitans from the left involves the assumption alluded to by Vertovec and Cohen’s phrase above – ‘politically uncommitted’ – that privileged travellers are not engaged. As Bruce Robbins explains, ‘The most general form of the case against cosmopolitanism on the left is the assumption that to pass outside the borders of one’s nation, whether by physical travel or merely by thoughts and feelings entertained while one stays

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at home, is to wallow in privileged and irresponsible detachment’ (Cheah and Robbins 4). Lessing’s life-long political commitments clearly demonstrate that detachment is not a necessary consequence of a cosmopolitan outlook or a TCK upbringing. I will return to this issue of detachment later in relation to the myth of the exiled writer. The potential value of the concept of the TCK to writing and literature is very briefly discussed by Van Reken and Pollock themselves: As TCKs live in various cultures, they not only learn about cultural differences but they also experience the world in a tangible way that is impossible to do through reading books, seeing movies, or watching nightly newscasts alone. Because they have lived in so many places . . . throughout their lives when they read a story in the newspaper or watch it on the TV screen, the flat, odorless images there transform into an internal 3-D panoramic picture show . . . Having a 3-D view of the world is a useful skill not only for reading stories but for writing them. For TCKs who like to write, their culturally rich and highly mobile childhoods give them a true breadth of hands-on experiences in many places to add life to their work. In a feature article for Time (8 February 1992) called ‘The Empire Writes Back’, Pico Iyer gives an account of an entirely new genre of award-winning authors, all of whom have cross-cultural backgrounds . . . Iyer goes on to describe the great diversity of each writer’s background and then states, ‘But the new transcultural writers are something different. For one, they are the products not so much of colonial division as of the international culture that has grown up since the war, and they are addressing an audience as mixed up and eclectic and uprooted as themselves.’ Without ever using, or perhaps knowing, the term third culture kids, Iyer has conveyed vividly the richness of their experience. (83–5, my ellipses) To a literary scholar this presentation of experience as something that ‘adds life to’ writing and the phrase a ‘3-D view of the world’ seem rather clumsy. The notion of a TCK being able to ‘transform’ images from around the world into a more tangible experience does, however, helpfully echo Timothy Brennan’s argument in At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now regarding cosmopolitanism as ‘conversion’: The effort to understand cultural differences is not merely a matter of historical ‘boning up’, learning of terms and figures or even of foreign languages, although all these things are required; it is not merely an

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accretive process, but a liminal one. It entails the sort of mental shift one traditionally has called ‘conversion’. (27) Brennan goes on to explain the way in which he is using the word ‘conversion’ more clearly: I am using the word ironically – not as a coming into faith, nor a revelation of some unassailable truth that, suddenly beheld, is forced to become a thing to which others must subscribe. The issue is incommensurability, an absolute and cloistral division between class-historical mentalities. This conversion would mimic the religious metaphors of ‘shedding scales from the eyes’ or ‘stepping into the light’ as well as other images of psychic reorientation. Conversion would not so much mean being ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ the faithful as it would the unintelligibility of value in different locations of belief. And such locations have not been symmetrical. (28) Brennan’s suggestion here of the process of ‘conversion’ by which one comes to understand cultural difference and his idea of asymmetrical ‘locations of belief’ are also present in Lessing’s Nobel speech ‘On Not Winning the Nobel Prize’. ‘I am standing in a doorway looking through clouds of blowing dust to where I am told there is still uncut forest’, Lessing starts her speech by telling us. ‘Yesterday I drove through miles of stumps, and charred remains of fires where in ’56 was the most wonderful forest I have ever seen, all destroyed. People have to eat. They have to get fuel for fires’ (1). She identifies this location as Zimbabwe in the early 1980s. ‘Next day I am at a school in North London, a very good school, whose name we all know. It is a school for boys. Good buildings, and gardens’ (2). As she tries to describe the school in Zimbabwe which she has seen and understood partly due to her childhood connection to Zimbabwe, she realizes just how asymmetrical and unintelligible the ‘different locations of belief’ are to each other: I am sure that everyone here, making a speech will know that moment when the faces you are looking at are blank. Your listeners cannot hear what you are saying: there are no images in their minds to match what you are telling them. In this case, of a school standing in dust clouds, where water is short, and where, at the end of a term, a just killed goat cooked in a great pot is the end of term treat. Is it really so impossible for them to imagine such bare poverty? (2)

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Lessing’s speech implies the extent to which she values her own crosscultural experiences as have enabled the sort of ‘conversion’ Brennan describes. Lessing realizes that she is trying to talk across what Brennan terms ‘incommensurability, an absolute and cloistral division between classhistorical mentalities’ and that there is almost total ‘unintelligibility of value’ in the different locations of belief that she has been able to occupy (Brennan 28; qtd above). Van Reken and Pollock’s awkward representation of the relationship between the TCK experience and writing also raises the issue of genre. It is important to consider whether the success of the term ‘Third Culture Kid’ in cyber- and popular culture has not been matched by any application of the term in literary studies due to the politics of genre. Most studies that explore TCKs are self-help books,12 a genre wonderfully parodied by Margaret Atwood in Oryx and Crake through Jimmy’s dissertation titled ‘Self-Help Books of the Twentieth Century: Exploiting Hope and Fear’ (195). Self-help books garner little literary respect and their emphasis on experience and anecdote does tend to make it difficult to theorize from them. However, it could be argued that Van Reken and Pollock are offering in the term ‘Third Culture Kid’ a more specific designation for a type of international writing that has been subsumed to date by literary scholars under the broader term ‘postcolonial’. Perhaps the term ‘Third Culture Kid’ offers an alternative to Rich and Lyall’s clumsy phrase ‘Persian-born, Rhodesian-raised and London-residing novelist’ – an alternative that recognizes the complexity of Lessing’s position on the borders between colonial/ postcolonial and British/African. As Lessing herself reminds us in an interview with Bill Moyers, ‘when I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable’ (Lessing, ‘Interview’) so to position Lessing as a ‘postcolonial’ writer is in some ways problematic and ahistorical, or at the very least, doing so forces us to recognize the ways in which the term ‘postcolonial’ needs to include histories and experiences from well before and well after Independence.13 Having offered a brief history and explanation of the term ‘Third Culture Kid’ and its intersection with contemporary theories of cosmopolitanism, I want to turn to Doris Lessing’s autobiography, Under My Skin, to explore these concepts’ relevance to her life and writing. I started my explanation of the concept of a ‘third culture’ by describing the kinds of interstitial spaces Useem found expatriates occupying – often military bases and missionaries. Lessing’s Under My Skin demonstrates a deep concern for the space she was brought up in. She describes her house on the veld in intimate detail and these details reveal a TCK’s sensibility concerning spaces

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and ‘home’. These detailed descriptions show clearly how her parents’ home on the veld functioned as a ‘culture between cultures’. For example, in her descriptions of the house’s interior, she juxtaposes her mother’s very English Liberty curtains with the ‘pale grey mud of the walls’ which was left ‘unwhitewashed, because it looked so nice with the Liberty curtains’ and also with the ‘dressing table of petrol boxes, painted black’ in her parents’ bedroom (57). She recalls the battles between her parents over their expectations of the ‘houseboy’, battles which were, in effect, culture clashes: Throughout my childhood [my father] remonstrated with my mother, more in sorrow than in anger, about the folly of expecting a man just out of a hut in the bush to understand the importance of laying a place at table with silver in its exact order, or how to arrange brushes and mirrors on a dressing table. For very early my mother’s voice had risen into the high desperation of the white missus, whose idea of herself, her family, depended on middle-class standards at Home. (73) Lessing discusses her own battle with her mother over her bedroom door: From my bed I saw the sun spring up behind the chrome mountain and pass rapidly up out of sight, I saw the moon rise, soar up and away. I used to prop the door open with a stone, so that what went on in the bush was always visible to me – it was only a few paces down the steep slope. I fought with my mother to have this door open. (70) In these battles, Lessing allies herself with her father as having settled in and accepted this mud farmhouse and its surrounding African landscape and culture as their new home, as opposed to her mother who desperately tries to keep up middle-class British standards and ways of life.14 The different reactions of Lessing’s parents to ‘home’ and displacement echo the gendered imagery that dominated nationalist discourse and trench poetry during World War I. Women and England were often elided and presented as being that which young men should die defending as in the England who gave ‘her flowers to love, her ways to roam’ (my emphasis) to Rupert Brooke in ‘The Soldier’; or, more negatively, women were presented as the ignorant cause of the awful bloodshed such as the women who so wrongly ‘believe / That chivalry redeems the war’s disgrace’ in Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘Glory of Women’. Lessing has always perceived her parents’ marriage to be the result of the First World War. In her recent book Alfred and Emily Lessing writes the biography of her parents as if the

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First World War did not happen, and it is a vastly different narrative to what really happened in their lives. Indeed, they do not marry each other at all. Lessing’s father’s embrace of the immigrant life and his rejection of Englishness were intimately related to his disillusioning experiences in the First World War trenches. Despite Lessing’s negative portrayals of her mother’s resistance to life as a farmer’s wife in Rhodesia and determination to hold onto her middleclass Englishness, she also describes her mother’s care over her education and remembers with gratitude the books from ‘back home’ that her mother ordered for her. As she says in her Nobel speech, ‘I was brought up in what was virtually a mud hut, thatched . . . and, the point is, it was full of books . . . A mud hut, but full of books’ (4; my ellipses). She also describes sympathetically her mother’s homesickness for England. Indeed, Lessing states directly that ‘one of the difficulties of this record is how to convey the contradictions of white attitudes’ (Under My Skin 72). It is clear from these descriptions that the house she was brought up in was, indeed, an interstitial and contradictory space existing between her mother’s British middleclass ideals and the African bush. Ambivalence over the concept of ‘home’ runs throughout Under My Skin. Lessing talks extensively about the contradictory notions of her British ‘home’ that her parents passed onto her, and juxtaposes their stories against her own very physical (and largely happy) experiences of the Rhodesian bush. This description of an afternoon playtime is a perfect example of a TCK’s complex notion of ‘home’: There was a treehouse, platforms of planks in the musasa tree just behind the house. ‘Come up to our house, come up’, we shouted at Daddy, as he manoeuvred his great clumsy leg so that he got himself on to the first platform. Then up came Mummy, and she told us about life in England, and her voice was sad, so sad that he rebuked her, ‘Don’t sound such a misery, old girl. England wasn’t all roses, you know’. And then he might tell us of another England, the beggars, the out-of-work ex-soldiers selling matches. (80) The treehouse is emblematic of how physically at home TCKs tend to make themselves in the host country. As Lessing says in Under My Skin, ‘An intense physicality, that is the truth of childhood’ (18). Indeed, Lessing’s descriptions of the physical place of the bush and the mud farmhouse are some of the most poetic passages in her autobiography. However, as she sits in the musasa tree in what she feels to be ‘our house’, Lessing is told by her

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parents about her ‘real’ home. In this example, it is interesting that her father accuses her mother of the same ‘terrible lying nostalgia’ as Anna will blame herself for in The Golden Notebook with regards to Southern Africa (77). Lessing returns to these stories of England a little later on in Under My Skin to describe how she protected herself from them: All that talk of abundant paradises . . . there are ways of listening to travellers’ tales that keep you safe from them. That England they talked about, all that green grass and spring flowers and cows as friendly as cats – what had all that to do with me? (82) In chapter 2 of Under My Skin, Lessing offers a sustained consideration of the problematic task of sitting down ‘to write about yourself’ (11). One of the problems she identifies is our tendency to ‘make up our pasts’: You can actually watch your mind doing it, taking a little fragment of fact and then spinning a tale out of it. No, I don’t think this is only the fault of story-tellers. A parent says, ‘We took you to the seaside, and you built a sandcastle, don’t you remember? – look, here is the photo’. And at once the child builds from the words and the photograph a memory, which becomes hers. But there are moments, incidents, real memory, I do trust. This is partly because I spent a good part of my childhood ‘fixing’ moments in my mind. Clearly I had to fight to establish a reality of my own, against an insistence from the adults that I should accept theirs. Pressure had been put on me to admit that what I knew was true was not so. I am deducing this. Why else my preoccupation that went on for years: this is the truth, this is what happened, hold on to it, don’t let them talk you out of it. (13–14) This is exactly the dynamic that exists between TCKs and their parents over the issue of feeling ‘at home’ in a host country. For a child, the country they live in and physically experience daily is home. Their parents’ stories, however, try to teach them that this is not the case, that ‘home’ is elsewhere. TCKs are born into what Mary Louise Pratt has termed ‘contact zones’. Pratt uses this term ‘to refer to the space of imperial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict’. She uses ‘contact zone’ synonymously with the term ‘colonial frontier’ which more clearly captures the Western sense that the ‘contact zone’ is ‘out there’,

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away from the ‘centre’ which is ‘home’. However, this is what can render TCKs so potentially disruptive of colonial discourses and practices. For them, the ‘contact zone’ is very much ‘in here’ not ‘out there’. Pratt suggests that ‘contact zone’ is a more effectively anti-imperialist term than ‘colonial frontier’ because, [It] foregrounds the interactive, improvisational dimensions of imperial encounters so easily ignored or suppressed by accounts of conquest and domination told from the invader’s perspective. A ‘contact’ perspective emphasizes how subjects get constituted in and by their relations to each other. It treats the relations among colonizers and colonized, or travelers and ‘travelees’, not in terms of separateness, but in terms of co-presence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, and often within radically asymmetrical relations of power. (8)15 Pratt’s emphasis on ‘how subjects get constituted in and by their relations to each other’ is highly pertinent to the experience of TCKs who face the task of growing up through the process of constituting themselves in the ‘contact zone’. She notes her indebtedness to linguistics for the phrase ‘contact’, an indebtedness that is also evident in Homi Bhabha’s emphasis on the ‘process of language’ in his concept of ‘Third Space’. I am arguing for a similarly disruptive potential in the narratives of Third Culture Kids’ lives as Bhabha argues for the ‘Third Space of enunciation’: The intervention of the Third Space of enunciation, which makes the structure of meaning and reference an ambivalent process, destroys this mirror of representation in which cultural knowledge is customarily revealed as an integrated, open, expanding code. Such an intervention quite properly challenges our sense of the historical identity of culture as a homogenizing unifying force, authenticated by the originary Past, kept alive in the national tradition of the People. In other words, the disruptive temporality of enunciation displaces the narrative of the Western nation which Benedict Anderson so perceptively describes as being written in homogeneous, serial time. (Location 54) Bhabha’s argument here returns us to issues of Lessing’s ‘timeliness’ or ‘untimeliness’ which I briefly discussed in my introduction. To be born into the ‘contact zone’ as Third Culture Kids are, is necessarily to be ‘untimely’ in that the usual chronology of learning to be ‘at home’ in a nation as a child is disrupted and the TCK is cut off from ‘the originary Past’.

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Unlike the immigrant child for whom strategies such as Lessing adopts – rejecting her parents’ stories of England as having nothing ‘to do with me’ and attempting to ‘make herself at home’ in the African landscape – might assist in the desired process of assimilation in the new country, the TCK is always haunted by the need to ‘return home’ to a place they have never been. Later in Under My Skin, Lessing admits that, There is no way of exaggerating what I felt about losing my British nationality on marriage, and having to apply for it again. This goes much deeper than words, tears or – well, what? These processes go on well out of sight and of understanding. I was left with a feeling about my British passport that the most simple-minded patriot would applaud. (404) The emphasis on feeling and emotion – and particularly an emotion that can’t be analysed, one that is ‘deeper than words’ – is interesting here and returns us to the emphasis on experience in the research into TCKs. One of the effects of the use of the self-help genre to disseminate research into TCKs is that it is marked by a sustained concern for real lived experience and illustrative anecdotes.16 Although, as I have suggested above, this emphasis renders this work on TCKs resistant to theorizing in ways that may have more easily facilitated its application to literary and cultural studies, this focus on experience is particularly appropriate for Lessing studies. Lessing herself seems to privilege the anecdotal over the historical when she states that she reads ‘history with conditional respect’ because so often ‘the actual participants keep their counsel’ so that the way we publicly remember events is distorted (Under My Skin 11–12). Rich and Lyall’s review of Lessing’s Nobel Prize was also typical in its emphasis on Lessing’s ‘deeply autobiographical writing’ and it is Lessing’s autobiographical fiction that is most widely read. This returns us to Pollock and Van Reken’s claim that, ‘For TCKs who like to write, their culturally rich and highly mobile childhoods give them a true breadth of hands-on experiences in many places to add life to their work’ (84; qtd above). The relationship between life and text, between experience and writing is notoriously difficult to theorize, but it certainly seems to be the case that readers are attracted to Lessing’s fiction partly due to the interesting experiences from which she writes. One way to theorize this relationship between Lessing’s life as a Third Culture Kid and her writing is to return to Bhabha’s work and, specifically, his concept of ‘marginal voices or minority discourse’ (301). Locating himself in ‘that moment of the scattering of the people that in other times and other places, in the nations of others, becomes a time of gathering.

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Gatherings of exiles and emigrés and refugees, gathering on the edge of ‘foreign’ cultures; gathering at frontiers’ (291), it seems that this is as much a ‘moment’ of cosmopolitanism as it is of postcoloniality, an example of what Benita Parry identified in 1991 as ‘an emergent postcolonial cosmopolitanism’ (qtd in Cheah and Robbins 1). It is in these scatterings and gatherings that Lessing has lived her life. In ‘DissemiNation: time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation’ Bhabha argues that there is a temporal disjunction between two co-existent but contradictory definitions of a nation’s people: The people are not simply historical events or parts of a patriotic body politic. They are also a complex rhetorical strategy of social reference where the claim to be representative provokes a crisis within the process of signification and discursive address. We then have a contested cultural territory where the people must be thought in a double-time; the people are historical ‘objects’ of a nationalist pedagogy, giving the discourse an authority that is based on the pre-given or constituted historical origin or event; the people are also the ‘subjects’ of a process of signification that must erase any prior or originary presence of the nation-people to demonstrate the prodigious, living principle of the people as that continual process by which the national life is redeemed and signified as a repeating and reproductive process. The scraps, patches, and rags of daily life must be repeatedly turned into the signs of a national culture, while the very act of the narrative performance interpellates a growing circle of national subjects. In the production of the nation as narration there is a split between the continuist, accumulative temporality of the pedagogical, and the repetitious, recursive strategy of the performance. It is through this process of splitting that the conceptual ambivalence of modern society becomes the site of writing the nation. (297) For the Third Culture Kid, this ‘split between’ the ‘continuist, accumulative temporality of the pedagogical’ and the ‘repetitious, recursive strategy of the performance’ is particularly obvious and contradictory. Lessing’s mother certainly attempts to turn the ‘scraps, patches, and rags of daily life’ into the ‘signs of [her] national culture’ as her Liberty curtains and insistence on a properly laid table and full-cooked English breakfast make clear. However, her attempts fail as a ‘repeating and reproductive process’ of Englishness. They are undermined by the very un-English mud hut and by ‘the folly of expecting a man just out of a hut in the bush to understand the importance of laying a place at table with silver in its exact order’ (Under

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My Skin 73; qtd above). For the young Doris Lessing the disjunction between her parents as English ‘historical “objects” of a nationalist pedagogy’ and their current existence as ‘“subjects” of a process of signification’, a ‘continual process by which the national life is redeemed and signified’ is absurd, ‘incommensurate’ to her in the sense that Brennan uses the word in his discussion of ‘conversion’ quoted above. Indeed, she admits at the beginning of In Pursuit of the English that ‘it was not until I had been in England for some time that I understood my father’ (5). For Lessing the ‘conceptual ambivalence of modern society’ is clearly, and sometimes painfully, selfevident, as she demonstrates in her admission that ‘one of the difficulties of this record is how to convey the contradictions of white attitudes’ (Under My Skin 72; qtd above). Her awareness of the ambivalence and contradiction at the heart of the nation is perhaps even clearer in that other autobiographical work, In Pursuit of the English, where she humorously describes the impossibility of ever meeting a ‘real’ Englishman. Bhabha argues that it is the contradiction between the nation-people as pedagogical object and performative subject that ‘provides both a theoretical position and a narrative authority for marginal voices or minority discourse’, (301) such as, perhaps, Doris Lessing’s. Julia Kristeva goes even further in her celebration of marginality in her essay ‘A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident’ when she suggests that ‘Writing is impossible without some kind of exile’. She goes onto argue that ‘Exile is already in itself a form of dissidence, since it involves uprooting oneself from a family, a country or a language. More importantly, it is an irreligious act that cuts all ties’ (298).17 Born into exile, it is perhaps no wonder that Lessing describes herself as a compulsive writer. Furthermore, Kristeva’s argument that exile, cutting all ties, and writing are all related is an appropriate one to place alongside the image of Lessing leaving South Africa, her parents, and her children with her manuscript of The Grass is Singing in her suitcase. However, to read Lessing as a Third Culture Kid is to position her differently from the exile. Timothy Brennan discusses the relationship between ‘the intellectual or the bohemian’ and ‘the artistic movements of continental modernism’ (15) which, in Raymond Williams’ words, took the ‘experience of visual and linguistic strangeness, the broken narrative of the journey and its inevitable accompaniment of transient encounters’ and ‘raised to the level of universal myth this intense singular narrative of unsettlement, homelessness, solitude and impoverished independence’ (qtd in Brennan 18). Against this myth, which clearly informs Kristeva’s reading of the exilic writer, Brennan places the new cosmopolitan writer:

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Cosmopolitans in this sense, for example, reject the assumptions that they are “exiles” (until now, a dominant theoretical category of twentiethcentury fiction) . . . On the contrary, the argument is that they represent a future world reality – a reality of world subjects. (28; my ellipses) The notion that TCKs are exemplary of this new ‘reality of world subjects’ has already been extensively debated. Interaction International, the group founded by the late Dr David Pollock to assist TCKs, used to state on its home page that ‘TCKs are one of the fastest growing people groups in our world today and are the prototype citizens of the 21st century’. In an article in the Telegraph on 23 February 2006 Ruth Rusby asked, ‘Are Cross-Cultural Kids the prototype citizens of the future?’ This view of the cosmopolitan as representative of a ‘future world reality’ is reflected in the prophetic tone of several of Lessing’s works including, most notably, the ending of The FourGated City and The Memoirs of Survivor. Lessing’s own comments regarding whether her outlook is that of the exile or the cosmopolitan are contradictory. On the one hand, her description of writers in Prisons We Choose to Live Inside as being more easily able to ‘achieve this detachment from mass emotions and social conditions’ (7) which she presents as desirable, does indeed position them as outsiders, exiles. However, her description in interview of her Children of Violence series as being ‘about people like myself, people my age who are born out of wars and who have lived through them, the framework of lives in conflict. I think the title explains what I essentially want to say. I want to explain what it is like to be a human being in a century when you open your eyes on war and on human beings disliking other human beings’ (A Small Personal Voice 61) suggest that she views herself very much as writing as a citizen of the world at a particular contemporary moment. Perhaps the image that most hauntingly captures Lessing’s particular cosmopolitan outlook is that which appears in both the The Golden Notebook and The Four-Gated City of an individual in a room surrounded by world news. At the end of The Golden Notebook, Anna surrounds herself in her flat with newspaper clippings of the world’s disasters. Similarly, in The Four-Gated City, Mark puts up two maps of the world and quickly comes to cover them with information about bombs, war, famine, riots, poverty and prisons but ‘On neither map was any attention paid to nationalisms or politics’ (312–13). This image is a concrete expression of Lessing’s committed cosmopolitanism and is suggestive of how she resolved her sense of being ‘at home in the world’ to borrow Timothy Brennan’s phrase.

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A central aspect of the TCK experience is the difficult one of ‘returning home’ to a country that is completely foreign, that experience described by Kay Branaman Eakin’s title – ‘According to My Passport, I’m Coming Home’. Lessing concludes Under My Skin with her departure to England. Most TCKs organize the chronology of their lives according to the spaces they occupied. The decision to end the first volume of her autobiography in 1949, the famous year of her departure from South Africa, structures the entire narrative and re-enacts the separation of different stages of life from each other that most TCKs experience. In the final pages of Under My Skin, Lessing describes herself as ‘conditioned for tears’ (410) and grief is a common element of TCK narratives. Pollock and Van Reken’s Third Culture Kids closes with an appendix by Paul Asbury Seaman entitled ‘The Long Good-bye: Honoring Unresolved Grief’. Seaman argues that ‘Dealing with the accumulated grief of too many leavings is an essential part of the global nomad legacy’ (313). Lessing echoes this thought at the end of Under My Skin using the image of a door closing that appears in many anecdotes from TCKs: ‘Doors had been shutting behind me all my life’ (418). Indeed, Under My Skin itself and the autobiographical fiction Lessing wrote in her early years in London could be read as Lessing’s ‘long good-bye’ to Rhodesia. Her final paragraph acknowledges the importance of her experiences as a Third Culture Kid and the contradictory cultural inheritances of that upbringing, over the sense she had at the time of having been ‘born out of my own self’: In this book I have been presented – I have presented myself – as a product of all those McVeaghs, Flowers, Taylers, Batleys, Millers, Snewins and Cornishes, sound and satisfactory English, Scottish, Irish compost, nurtured by Kent, Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Devon and Somerset. I am slotted into place, a little item on a tree of descent. But that is not how I experienced myself then. That’s all over, I was thinking, that’s done with, meaning the tentacles of family. I was born out of my own self – so I felt. I didn’t want to know. I was not going home to my family, I was fleeing from it. The door had shut and that was that. (419) Certainly Lessing’s 1957 essay ‘The Small Personal Voice’ makes it clear that she did not experience her move to England as a ‘home-coming’ and that she initially resisted being ‘slotted’ into such a confining place: It [i.e. Britain] is a country so profoundly parochial that people like myself, coming in from outside, never cease to marvel. Do the British

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people know that all over what is politely referred to as the Commonwealth, millions of people continually discuss and speculate about their probable reaction to this or that event? No, and if they did, they would not care. . . . To discuss politics in Britain with most people means that in five minutes one is astounded to find that the talk is of whether old Freddie or Tony is going to be sent out to govern New South Wales, or whether John or Jack will be the next secretary of the Trade Union. Thinking internationally means choosing a particular shade of halfenvious, half-patronizing emotion to feel about the United States; or collecting money for Hungary, or taking little holidays in Europe, or liking French or Italian films. Meanwhile the world churns, bubbles, and ferments. (20–1) Craig Storti has identified this negative experience as being one of the greatest challenges for returning TCKs: Living overseas makes many expatriates more conscious of the world beyond their country’s borders, and they are also used to mingling with people with a similar broad perspective. By contrast, the people back home often seem narrow and provincial. ‘Finns still think they live in the centre of the world’, one returnee observed, ‘and the rest of the world doesn’t exist.’ Often the people one knows back home can’t talk about world affairs, hardly even national affairs, and see no reason why they should know about other countries. In the worst cases, they seem downright prejudiced, even xenophobic. (18) This consciousness of ‘the world beyond their country’s borders’ has been an integral part of Lessing’s writing. Like Anna and Mark sitting in rooms surrounded by clippings of the world’s news, Lessing’s texts occupy an interstitial, intercultural space with close intertextual relationships with the world’s news stories. There is a danger with the concept of the Third Culture Kid that generalizing from so many intercultural experiences can ironically have the effect of erasing cultural difference rather than illuminating it. Certainly, work to date on the concept can be criticized for blindness towards issues of how race, gender and class all affect and diversify the TCK experience. Similarly, those currently working on theories of cosmopolitanism are keen, in Bruce Robbins’ words, to ‘concede that cosmopolitanism is located and embodied’, explore and distinguish between ‘a range of diverse cosmopolitanisms’, and ‘participate in and comment on the term’s scaling down, its

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pluralizing and particularizing’ (Cheah and Robbins 2–3). The recent turn to cosmopolitanism has been marked by concerns about education and the potential application of a cosmopolitan outlook to curriculum. I think that one of the helpful applications of this concept of Doris Lessing as a cosmopolitan TCK would be in the classroom as her own Nobel speech locating her in two very different classrooms itself suggests. Carey Kaplan and Ellen Cronan Rose’s Approaches to Teaching Lessing’s The Golden Notebook is very keen to provide contexts for The Golden Notebook – political, theoretical, feminist, historical, colonial backgrounds – against which to present this novel to students. I suggest that the theory of ‘third culture’ could offer another such context and one that (particularly in international educational situations) would be more accessible to contemporary students. As we come towards the end of Lessing’s career there will be increasing pressure on scholars and teachers of her work to demonstrate her ongoing relevance and importance to the twenty-first century, particularly given the tendency to associate Lessing with ‘timeliness’ with regard to her concerns and politics. As the provocative comment that TCKs are ‘the prototype citizens of the 21st century’ that used to appear on Interaction International’s homepage implies, I think that Lessing’s experiences as a TCK may be one of the reasons why her work will continue to be relevant to students.18 Applying the TCK concept to Lessing and recognizing its formative relationship to her cosmopolitan outlook could also place her fiction and autobiography in new comparative contexts. To compare Lessing’s work with fiction and autobiographies by other Third Culture Kids could reveal fascinating intercultural parallels as well as offering possibilities for critiquing theorists of ‘the TCK experience’ for their frequent blindness towards issues such as race and gender and how those categories pluralize and particularize ‘the TCK experience’. Although this work is beyond the scope of this essay, I hope that my reading of Under My Skin has illustrated that the ‘third culture’ context is a relevant and provocative one for Lessing’s work. It is a concept that illuminates the border crossings in both Lessing’s life and work.

Notes 1

For a fascinating feminist critique of ‘timeliness’ see Jane Elliott’s essay ‘The Currency of Feminist Theory’. Her argument that we need ‘to interrupt the contemporary moment with a practice of the untimely’ (1701) is an interesting one to consider alongside Lessing’s receipt of the 2007 Nobel Prize. Harold Bloom’s famous comment that ‘her work for the past 15 years’ has been ‘quite unreadable’

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(Crown) and Malcolm A. Kline’s opinion that she received the prize for ‘opinions she held before she changed her mind’, both seem to be arguing that her Nobel Prize was, in fact, ‘untimely’. Figures taken from Facebook on 2 April 2008. The group called ‘third culture kid. you wouldn’t understand’ has 6,207 members; ‘3rd Culture Kids’ have 249 members; ‘MKs of the world’ (short for ‘Missionary Kids’) has 1,207 members; and ‘Canadian Military Brats’ have 4,896 members. See http://www.state.gov/m/dghr/flo/c21995.htm. Web. 26 Nov 2007. To briefly clarify my use of terminology here, TCKs whose parents were in the military are often referred to as ‘Military Brats’ just as those whose parents were abroad doing missionary work are known as ‘Missionary Kids’. These are specific subgroups within the term Third Culture Kids. TCKs are sometimes also referred to as Global Nomads. However, as Mary Edwards Wertsch points out in her piece entitled ‘Outside Looking In’ in the collection Unrooted Childhoods, Nomads in the true sense are groups of people – Inuit, Bedouin, Masai – who move at will in search of hunting grounds, pastureland, water. Like us, they have no permanent home and they move constantly. But true nomads move in entire communities; the social fabric of their lives is kept intact. Nomad children grow up knowing their grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins. They have lifelong friends. (125–6) This is a crucial difference between nomads and TCKs and is the reason for my preference of the term Third Culture Kid.

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Many of those who join groups like Facebook’s ‘Third Culture Kids Everywhere’ are no longer children but as adults still identify with the concept because of the impact of that experience on their sense of themselves. These are known as ‘Adult Third Culture Kids’ or ‘ATCKs’. Kay Branaman Eakin captures this difficult use of the word ‘home’ for TCKs in the phrase ‘According to My Passport, I’m Coming Home’. See her online publication at http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/2065.pdf. Thanks to Dennis Walder and Virginia Tiger for their comments at the Second International Doris Lessing Conference which highlighted the importance of making this aspect of TCKs more explicit in my chapter. See Helen Kirwan-Taylor’s comic coining of the word ‘cosmoprats’ in her article ‘The Cosmocrats’ in the October 2000 issue of Harper and Queen quoted in Vertovec and Cohen (6). It is not entirely clear from the story whether Tommy is a TCK who is expected to return ‘home’ or an immigrant child who has moved permanently to this new home. There are, of course, many similarities between these two experiences. See Pollock and Ven Reken: Every time someone takes them to McDonald’s for a hamburger, the TCKs mention how many people could eat for a whole week back in their host country for the money this one meal costs. Even worse, they watch how much food people throw out and express their shock and horror. The person who

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bought them the hamburger sees the TCKs as ungrateful at best, condemning at worst. (248)

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There is also what is known informally among those who have travelled in order to volunteer in poorer countries as the ‘new fridge syndrome’. This colloquial phrase emerged from volunteers’ repeated anecdotes of sharing their own experiences of the world’s inequalities and the difficulties of life in the ‘third world’ with their privileged families upon returning home only to be informed that the major event of their time away for the family at home had been the purchase of a new refrigerator. See for example, the second volume of her autobiography Walking in the Shade: 1949 to 1962 and In Pursuit of the English. Or self-help online publications, which have even less literary ‘respectability’. The quotation from Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin eds. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader that is discussed in the introduction to this collection is pertinent here: ‘Post-colonial critics and theorists should consider the full implications of restricting the meaning of the term to ‘after-colonialism’ or after-Independence’ (2). It is helpful to read this section of my chapter alongside Pat Louw’s chapter in this collection. She demonstrates how several of Lessing’s child characters in her stories set in Africa cross the boundary between home and wilderness. See also Victoria Rosner’s argument in ‘“The Geography of that Wall”: Architectures of Motherhood in Under My Skin’ that: Figuring her adolescent rebellion as an “emigration,” a journey out of the mother-country to unknown parts, Lessing illustrates the unexpected reciprocity of maternity and colonialism, a relationship most clearly played out in border skirmishes fought by mother and daughter across the all-important boundary between house and bush. (12)

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Lessing’s awareness of these ‘asymmetrical relations of power’ is evident in her Nobel Prize speech as quoted above when she asks of the privileged school children in the private London school: ‘Is it really so impossible for them to imagine such bare poverty?’ (2) This emphasis on experience finds echoes in recent debates about what Bruce Robbins terms ‘actually existing cosmopolitanism’ (Cosmopolitics 1–19). Homi Bhabha is critical of Julia Kristeva in ‘DissemiNation’ suggesting that she ‘speaks perhaps too hastily of the pleasures of exile’ (292). Indeed, that readers do turn to her work for exactly this reason is evident in the fact that she is listed as a famous TCK on the ‘Third Culture Kids Everywhere’ Facebook group’s discussion board.

Works Cited Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. eds. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 1995. Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2003.

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Bhabha, Homi K. ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation’. Nation and Narration. Ed. Homi K Bhabha. London: Routledge, 1990. —1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 2007. Brennan, Timothy. At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1997. Brooke, Rupert. ‘The Soldier’. In The Longman Anthology of British Literature: Volume 2C – The Twentieth Century. Eds. Kevin Dattmar and Jennifer Wicke. London: Longman, 2003. 2185. Cheah, Pheng and Bruce Robbins. eds. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Cultural Politics. Vol. 14. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Crown, Sarah. ‘Doris Lessing Wins Nobel Prize’. 11 Oct 2007. Guardian News and Media Ltd. www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/oct/11/nobelprize.awardsandprizes [Web. 25 Nov 2008]. Dharwadker, Vinay. ed. Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture. London: Routledge, 2001. Eakin, Kay Branaman. ‘According to My Passport, I’m Coming Home’. 1998. www.state.gov/documents/organization/2065.pdf [Web. 26 Nov 2007]. Elliott, Jane. ‘The Currency of Feminist Theory’. Feminist Criticism Today. PMLA, 121.5 (Oct 2006), 1697–703. Interaction International. n.d. www.interactionintl.org/home.asp [Web. 26 Nov 2007]. Kline, Malcolm A. ‘Children of a Lesser Lessing’. Accuracy in Media. 6 Nov 2007. www.aim.org/aim-column/children-of-a-lesser-lessing/ [Web. 25 Nov 2008]. Kristeva, Julia. ‘A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident’. The Kristeva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. Lessing, Doris. Alfred and Emily. London: Fourth Estate-HarperCollins, 2008. — 1969. The Four-Gated City. London: Flamingo-HarperCollins, 1993. — 1962. The Golden Notebook. London: Flamingo-HarperCollins, 1972. — Interview. ‘Transcript: Bill Moyers Interviews Doris Lessing’. Now. 24 Jan 2003. www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_lessing.html [Web. 25 Nov 2008]. — ‘On Not Winning the Nobel Prize’. Nobel Lecture. 7 Dec 2007. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2007/lessing-lecture_en.html [Web. 15 Apr 2008]. — Prisons We Choose to Live Inside. New York: Harper and Row, 1987. — A Small Personal Voice: Essays, Reviews, Interviews. 1974. Ed. Paul Schlueter. London: Flamingo, 1994. — ‘The Small Personal Voice’ (1957). In A Small Personal Voice: Essays, Reviews, Interviews. (1974). Ed. Paul Schlueter. London: Flamingo, 1994. pp. 20–1. — Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949. London: FlamingoHarperCollins, 1994. — Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography 1949 to 1962. London: HarperCollins, 1997. Pollock, David C. and Ruth E. Van Reken. Third Culture Kids: The Experience of Growing Up Among Worlds. London: Nicholas Brealey & Intercultural Press, 2001. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. (1992). Rev. edn. London: Routledge, 2008.

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Rich, Motoko and Sarah Lyall. ‘Doris Lessing Wins Nobel Prize in Literature’. The New York Times. 11 Oct 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/world/ 11cnd-nobel.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin [Web. 26 Nov 2007]. Robbins, Bruce. ‘The Village of the Liberal Managerial Class’. Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture. Ed. Vinay Dharwadker. London: Routledge, 2001. pp. 15–32. Rosner, Victoria. ‘“The Geography of that Wall”: Architectures of Motherhood in Under My Skin’. Doris Lessing Newsletter, 20.2 (1999), pp. 12–15. Rusby, Ruth. ‘Are Cross-Cultural Kids the Prototype Citizens of the Future?’ Telegraph. 23 Feb 2008. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/global/main.jhtml?view= DETAILS&grid=&xml=/global/2006/02/23/expatliv.xml [Web. 1 Apr 2008]. Sassoon, Siegfried. ‘Glory of Women’. The Longman Anthology of British Literature: Volume 2C – The Twentieth Century. Eds. Kevin Dattmar and Jennifer Wicke. London: Longman, 2003. 2186. Seaman, Paul Asbury. ‘The Long Good-bye: Honoring Unresolved Grief’. Appendix B. Eds. Pollock and Van Reken. 313–18. Storti, Craig. The Art of Coming Home. (1996) London: Nicholas Brealey & Intercultural Press, 2001. Vertovec, Steven and Robin Cohen. eds. Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. Wertsch, Mary Edwards. ‘Outside Looking In’. Unrooted Childhoods: Memoirs of Growing Up Global. Eds. Faith Eidse and Nina Sichel. London: Nicholas Brealey & Intercultural Press, 2004. pp. 117–32.

Chapter 8

Environmental Fables? The Eco-Politics of Doris Lessing’s ‘Ifrik’ Novels Fiona Becket University of Leeds, UK

[. . .] every fable is melancholic, since it supplements reality (Lyotard)

For David Mazel, who writes mainly about the American tradition, a critique which properly acknowledges and produces the ‘postnatural’ does so by resistance to the assumptions of much literary environmentalism, in particular uncritical constructions of ‘wilderness’. In a critique which challenges the grounds of Bill McKibben’s claims in The End of Nature (1989) – it is McKibben who is associated with the development of the term ‘postnatural’ in relation to a concept of unspoilt wilderness – Mazel eloquently concludes that, Postnaturality is not about our sense that there is no longer any escape from culture into nature – such a feeling, after all, is hardly new. The term more sensibly should refer to our just-dawning sense that such an escape never was available. (Mazel 34) Much of what is important here is about perception. The environmentalist whose ‘degree zero’ is wilderness is, for Mazel, something of a repressive agent whose discursive force the fabulist, we can speculate, might counteract by the act of imagining, and does so, furthermore, in the certain knowledge that all landscapes associated with habitation – in whatever degree – are always already inscribed with stories (Mazel 161). This is something that Lessing identifies in the central metaphor of her novel Mara and Dann (1999) – the traces and remains of culture in contexts where what

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Slavoj Žižek might call the ‘real’ of nature has become manifest – and its sequel, The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog (2005). In order to attempt to understand the relation of culture and nature in these books – and the persistence of this duality – this meditation on the contours of the possibility of an eco-political dimension of Lessing’s speculative fiction begins with two fables.

Two Fables Lyotard’s postmodern fable about the end of the world (delivered as a talk in 1982, and published in 1993) presents us with a fantasy of the end of history. The text is usually interpreted in the terms that follow. The ‘happily ever after’ of human perfection or at any rate emancipation (from the human) is challenged. Unlike scientific modes of understanding, the fabular mode offers hypotheses that are exempted from the constraints of either verification or falsification and that is the chief difference between them (Lyotard 12–22; 18). The postmodern fable, as it is told here, demands that we acknowledge two kinds of transformation. The one, which describes the physical laws and processes of the (inevitable) burn up of the solar system; and the other, which describes the mutation and, hence, the end of, the human organism – Doris Lessing’s The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, in its conclusions, occupies similar ground. That is to say, the transformation of the human into the post-human as the necessary condition of its departure from itself (which is not the ‘emancipation’ of historical progress), is the enactment of a wistful decentring. This notion of human mutability is the proper subject of a moral fable – a ‘mere fable’ says Lyotard – because ‘[a] fable is exposed neither to argumentation nor to falsification. It is not even a critical discourse, but merely imaginary’. And then, crucially, ‘This is how it exploits the space of indetermination the system keeps open for hypothetical thought’ (Lyotard 21). Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, published in 1962, has been called ‘the founding text of modern environmentalism’ in as much as it gives ecology and environmentalism a discursive presence (Garrard 2). Carson’s arguments suggest that what is at stake in the maintenance and preservation of an unpolluted biosphere is nothing less than human emancipation. Silent Spring begins with a ‘Fable for Tomorrow’ which revises and reverses the narrative of human progress by predicting environmental catastrophe. Written in the mode of a Jeremiad, Carson’s fable, concerned as it is with the effects of pollution principally derived from pesticides and insecticides,

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predicts the consequences of human fragility, both physical and moral, by raising the spectre of irreversible contamination. In Silent Spring most culpable are institutions and organizations with a vested interest in refuting the evidence of what is cast as oppositional science. The locus of the fable is a ‘town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings’ which has yet become stricken by an invisible contagion. Carson warns that while the town ‘does not exist’, yet it might have ‘a thousand counterparts in America or elsewhere’ where the ‘imagined tragedy’ of ecocide becomes ‘stark reality’ (21–2). Silent Spring is credited with raising levels of consciousness about environmental concerns in North America to a degree which promoted environmental activism at organized and domestic levels. It is a book which opposes to the concealments and distortions of ‘authorised versions’ within the discourse of science (of the safety of specific compounds in terms of their industrial use, for instance), the revelations of unaffiliated fieldwork on the basis of a heightened ethical and social sense. However, Carson is as wedded as her detractors to the objectivity of scientific investigation, to ‘traditional’ science which accepts what Žižek calls the ‘uniform law (regular connection of causes and effects etc)’ (Looking 39). Carson’s fable, distinct from the postmodern example, accepts the necessity of a benign mastery, and fears the repercussions of instrumentalism, but science, in the book’s final section, maintains its authority, acquiring legitimacy in as much as it acknowledges, and operates within, the imperatives of (the science of) ecology. So, the human subject retains mastery of nature in Silent Spring. The role of modern environmentalism is produced in the issues identified in Silent Spring, motivated by Carson’s opposition to the unexamined use of pesticides in the United States, particularly in the post-war period in which much agro-chemical invention grew out of military research. Carson’s biographer, Linda Lear, also reminds us that Carson completed her study in the context of Cold War secrecy and paranoia: She began her research when the US military was trying to hide the details of the atomic tests in the Bikini Islands, and published it a few months after the world was brought to the brink of nuclear holocaust with the Cuban Missile Crisis. (‘Afterword’ Silent Spring 259–60) Read from the perspective of Carson’s champions, the emergence of modern environmentalism is in the first place oppositional, derived in large part from a suspicion of government scientists and an increased demand for transparency at the level of domestic politics. It is also connected to an

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ethos of resistance to the nature of Cold War politics, the intensification of the arms race, and the uses of science in the face of increased abuses of natural history. A position is reached whereby the testing of weapons in natural spaces and the resultant pollution/contamination of those spaces and the subjects (human and non-human) involved, can be legitimated for the greater good. Eco-politics is an example of what Jameson calls ‘positional thinking’. In certain key texts of the modern environmental movement a good/evil model is in play, and while this is up to a point inevitable, it can become self-sustaining. Powerful nations and corporations collaborate in the exploitation of earth’s resources for short-term gain. Pesticides and poisons reach their intended targets but exceed them to devastating effect, and the residues of such chemical treatments enter the soil and groundwater, disrupting local ecologies. Everywhere, national and local bodies which have the power to legislate appear careless of the evidence which points to irreversible environmental degradation. This is the over-riding message of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a book in which nature as a despised and denigrated Other is suddenly discursively present. More recently, it is also the message of Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers (2005). Read side by side these books give the effect both of a ‘before’ and ‘after’ which brackets the second half of the twentieth century, and a ‘to come’ which does not accommodate the post-human in the way of Lyotard’s postmodern fable.

Narrating the (Real) Event In genuinely postnatural writing, to return to Mazel, ‘landscape must highlight rather than obscure the complexities of history and politics’ (160). Lessing introduces part one of The Four-Gated City (1969) with a passage from Rachel Carson’s description of the ecology of the Florida Keys in ‘The Coral Coast’ chapter of The Edge of the Sea (1955). It is a passage which describes the gradual, accumulative ways in which the islands and reefs of the coast are built in the synergy of winds and sea currents; how the mangrove seedlings become rooted in the muddy shoals, bridging shallows and extending the mainland (Carson Edge 194). The Four-Gated City is a novel that plays self-consciously with the idea of continuity, with connections and the connectivity of events, and Lessing gives a metaphorical inflection to Carson’s description of coastal development. In the letter of Martha Hesse to Francis Coldridge at the end of The Four-Gated City, the sea’s edge is also a barometer of the effects of radioactive contamination and Britain

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is uninhabitable, a ‘charnelhouse’ (Lessing Four-Gated 658). When Martha talks in her letter about the special children, of whom Joseph Batts is one, she invokes Nature’s autonomy: ‘People like you and me are a sort of experimental model and Nature has had enough of us’ (663). To open her book, The Wind Blows Away Our Words (1987), about the Soviet offensive in Afghanistan and perceptions of that invasion in the West, Lessing invokes the figure of Cassandra, ill-fated sibyl. She does so in order to pose questions that have relevance beyond the book’s stated topic – the Soviet Union’s strategic and imperialist ambitions in Afghanistan and, in Lessing’s view, the West’s indifference to the plight of the Afghan people. She raises questions about humanity’s inability to respond adequately to warnings or to learn from history. The response of the Western powers to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, for Lessing, is one instance, another instance indeed, of that potent combination of critical blindness and strategic deafness which characterizes the general response to the unwelcome message. This tendency is noticeable, writes Lessing, in contexts far removed from the immediate political hotspots. It is evident, she argues, that at the time of writing, some parts of the global scientific community have become white-coated ‘Cassandras’ warning of what we, 20 years on, have learned to call climate change and global warming, to find the message falling on deaf ears (at the level of government, and those institutions responsible for legislation). Lessing, who near the beginning of The Wind Blows Away Our Words describes the experience of being in Sydney and watching dust – topsoil – blow into the sea as a direct result of deforestation inland, writes with full consciousness of the ‘postnatural’: We all know, or talk as if we know, that we should not destroy the world’s rain forests, cut down forests on mountainsides where the run-off of water can wash precious topsoil into the oceans, allow deserts to spread (they have been spreading for centuries, millennia). We should not put poisons into oceans, or let loose radioactivity that makes regions of our world uninhabitable. (16–17) It is significant that, while The Wind Blows Away Our Words is a personal response – part memoir, part history, part interviews – to the Soviet offensive against the Afghan people (warriors, intellectuals, refugees), it also offers a multilayered argument about commitment and (ir)responsibility, an argument which attempts objectivity. In constructing her argument about Afghanistan, Lessing succeeds in making the point that large-scale operations have highly personal, often personally tragic, consequences.

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People, individuals, suffer. So it is that, in her book, Lessing makes the necessary connections between the attempt of a global superpower to dominate a technologically inferior culture (Soviet expansionism), economic neo-colonialism (global industries operating with limited regulation in developing regions), and environmental degradation. This includes in its reach some considerations about climate change and its human consequences, and, in the year of the Chernobyl disaster (1986), reflections on industrial pollution and environmental catastrophe set against the necessity of energy generation. The thesis, that despite the warnings of history governments never learn to de-prioritize economic self-interest, deploys the figure of Cassandra to bring these vast areas of debate and experience into alignment. Eco-critic Richard Kerridge, in his excellent introduction to Writing the Environment describes his intellectual discipline as ‘environmentalism’s overdue move beyond science, geography and social science into “the humanities,”’ and he offers several insights into the (unconscious) assumptions that underpin the reporting of environmental catastrophe (5). He provides an example from the media treatment of Chernobyl, and invokes Žižek’s attempts to theorize ecological crisis as the ‘answer of the real’ in the ‘“Nature does not exist”’ section of Looking Awry (1991), concluding with Žižek that ‘The real is that which disrupts representation. . . . The real, material ecological crisis . . . is also a cultural crisis, a crisis of representation’ (3–4). If we further accept Žižek’s argument – which will include the view that ecological crisis may well be the factor that comes to disrupt the ‘new liberal-democratic order’ (Osborne 44) – that the event of Chernobyl temporarily repositioned the human subject, then we could do worse than note, with Kerridge, the provisional and conditional nature of that decentring in accounts of catastrophe. As for Lessing, she can, we recall, produce fables of annihilation which transform the emphasis on continuity and change (marked by the use of Carson in The Four-Gated City) into, for example, the collective re-formation of the ‘many and one’, the many into the transcendent Representative, in The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (161). How different, then, are the ‘Ifrik’ novels?

Lessing’s Environmental Fables Lessing has an interest in what might be called selective cultural amnesia in the face of very specific catastrophes that have harvested human lives (in The Wind Blows Away Our Words she cites, among other examples, the

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influenza epidemic of 1919). Such events seem to occupy a less conspicuous place in our historical narratives and, therefore, collective memory than, for example, the slaughter on the battlefields of the Great War, the lives lost recalled by virtue of a particular and recurrent mode of commemoration. Lessing asks ‘Is is (sic) that there are kinds of calamity our minds are equipped to deal with, but others not?’ (The Wind 21). In a manoeuvre that anticipates the content of the ‘Dann’, or ‘Ifrik’, novels, Lessing then moves into the realm of imaginative speculation. As if rehearsing the grounds for her novel of 1999 and its sequel, she writes of transience and, indirectly, of memory: The Ice Age will cover our cities, our achievements, our civilizations, our gardens and our forests, our fields and our orchards, will cover us . . . Who knows in what forms the civilizations will survive that do survive, and how life will return, when the Ice retreats again, and uncovers the tundras and permafrosts of Europe. (22) Lessing’s emphasis here is on the irresistible cycles of natural transformation, operational within vast chronological schemas. ‘Nature’ here excludes the human, which, diminished, re-formed, also re-emerges. A novelist can exploit, in that space reserved for hypothesis, the ideas of transience and the redundancy of the illusion of mastery which also figure in Lyotard’s postmodern fable. As we know, the postmodern (posthuman) fable decentres, therefore, displaces the human subject from the narrative of the familiar. Lessing’s environmental fables (the Dann novels), while they foreground contingency and purposelessness are, however, or so it is argued here, strangely incapable of properly seeing through, properly completing, the (necessary) interrogation of human centrality. In a way which is determined by the form (even, the formula) of the Dann novels, there is the irresistible draw of the ‘happily ever after’ which everywhere undermines the radical potential of the Ifrik novels (as postnatural) in as much as they are poised to offer a critique of the complexities of human authority in relation to environmental catastrophe. The postnatural narrative raises questions about form in relation to the contexts of its production. Lessing, in the author’s note to Mara and Dann, describes its form (‘a reworking of a very old tale . . . found not only in Europe but in most cultures of the world’), effectively universal, adapted, not to a narrative of ecocide exactly, but to speculation centred on the capacity of natural shifts in climate to assert what is in fact normal for planet Earth – recurrent, cyclical ice ages – but beyond memory and experience for the modern human. In Lessing’s words,

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the imagined perspective of our descendants is that ‘“In the 12,000-year interval between one thrust of the Ice Age and the next, there flourished a whole story of human development, from savagery and barbarism to high culture”’ (vii). The idea of progress here is so uncomplicated as to operate perhaps as something of a warning about the narrative to come. The ‘old tale’ is permitted to contain the new narrative of future catastrophe (from the point of view of the human subject). But, insofar as it stays true to a basic premise of the old tale, the protagonists prevail over local difficulties with something returned to them which was previously withheld – in this instance elevated social standing (Mara and Dann eventually have their ruling class identity disclosed to them) and the consequent promise (by occupation of the Centre) of political power. It can be asked to what extent contemporary social and cultural politics are explored in the Dann novels through a specific idea of natural transformations, hence they become ‘environmental fables’. Lessing imagines a variety of political economies. She does so by, as a first step, imposing the idea of violent, uncontrollable natural forces which serve to reduce human and non-human beings alike to the status of prey and predator, competitors for the remaining meagre resources in landscapes which are characterized by drought, erosion and desertification. It can be asked (and quickly discounted) whether Lessing has redeveloped the terrain of ‘nature writing’. Patrick D Murphy raises this question in relation to science fiction novels more generally, concluding that much science fiction can be ‘natureoriented literature’, that is to say, it directs attention to nature as an extra-discursive actuality, and to human/nature interaction, and can introduce environmental themes at the level of plot (263). So, what is invested in the invention (in the ‘Dann’ novels) of a postindustrial world reverted to a technologically degraded ‘medieval’ state (paradoxically, a post-capitalist pre-capitalist social formation), a world in which history is closed off, available in such a way which literalizes the trace and the distortion? The ‘Centre’ in the Dann novels has not held, certainly, but neither has a period of cultural rebirth followed its collapse. The fragmented history of cultures lies in a decaying fortress at the northern edge of Ifrik, just south of the Middle Sea and the Ice Mountains of Yerrup (Europe), shorn of any but the most partial narrative cohesion in a museum which is partly a work of mourning and partly aspirational. Mara wanders through the rooms of the museum like a time traveller, at last, after much travail, granted her desire to know but ill-equipped to interpret what she sees. Our own historical moment is addressed in terms of war and ecocide while our past is represented in the language of the junior school wall-display.

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The roof has fallen in on the ‘Peoples of the Sea’ and so the wanderers, Mara and Dann, turn to the next chamber which holds ‘The Age of Chivalry’. Technology has a few principal functions – warfare, transportation, exploration (space travel is showcased) and the generation of energy. Of the artefacts to be seen in the museum many are copies of copies of originals. Through generations of raiding and looting, artefacts and semi-functional machines like the skimmers have circulated among the invented peoples that inhabit the post-industrial dystopias of an imagined Africa, acquiring relative exchange values but retaining a level of mystification where proper use has been forgotten. In the sequel to Mara and Dann, the Sand Library is sinking into the marsh as the glacial melt waters cause sea levels to rise, and by these means Lessing engineers a scene of the end of knowledge. In a kind of Eden Project of the mind, so the fable goes, forgotten generations have constructed an effectively impregnable transparent cell in which, with seminal pages turned to the glass, it has preserved a remaindered textual culture. Human ingenuity (explosives) ultimately causes the cell to be breached but, with unabashed symbolism, once the texts are released from the vacuum the air destroys the ancient and fragile papers. Possession of the sand libraries in fact confirmed the ignorance that ownership was supposed to deny. Lessing here plays on the assumption that individual printed texts, separated from the particular contexts that produced them, nevertheless have an intrinsic value that makes their loss feel tragic; the moment of loss is an instant of cultural degradation. Only Griot, the practical soldier, is permitted the insight that, because they represent partial and de-contextualized knowledge, the loss of the sand libraries is not so tragic. In engineering this end Lessing prepares the ground for a tragic replay of the foundation of the state on the basis of militarily strong, savvy and ‘noble’ individuals, of which Dann is the exemplar, supported unfailingly by a series of devoted lieutenants, of which Griot is the final and most devoted manifestation. The history inherited by Dann’s generation in fragmented form is the history of anonymous collectivities, because singular voices are silenced by time. Climate change has forced mass migrations, wars over territory and resources, and nostalgic rebuilding programmes in which a spirit of imitation has prevailed over that of innovation – specifically in the reproduction of European cities on the sands of North Africa, and the creation of the Centre to house the artefacts of the past. In addition, Lessing’s exploration of the government of the many by the few results in an analysis of political realities and models based on overt violence and exploitation – the ‘benevolent’ tyranny of the three generals;

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the near-universal reliance on slavery; the notion of the military as providing refuge to the stateless; the normalization of breeding programmes in a context of reduced human fertility; the regulation of narcotics trading; the strategic exploitation of racial others; and finally, and perhaps most enduringly as a kind of fantasy antidote, the romance of kingship. In the ‘Dann’ novels, scenes are imagined in which hyper-technologized cultures and indigenous (pre-feudal) peoples interact. The failure of technology is addressed often with recourse to psychological imperatives: materials that endure, created to save resources by manifestly resisting obsolescence, have a relatively low value in the economies of the ‘Dann’ novels. Displaced artefacts encountered out of context – a crashed space vehicle – inspire a religious sentiment as a direct result of the preservation of mystery. In Chelops the enslaved Mahondis dominate their Hadron masters by organizing the trade in opium which is the Hadrons’ principal crop, and by raising the office of factotum to that of manager and administrator. At a time of famine and drought the well-irrigated fields of Chelops produce narcotics and drive the richest economies; and such economies divert much of their wealth into military protection and warfare. Beyond these relatively affluent city states populations of the disenfranchized, mostly the Rock People, scratch a living in stone-age conditions, or join the waves of emigrants moving north to more fertile, but war-torn, territories. Beyond settlement boundaries unprotected travellers are picked off by monstrous, mutant creatures also staving off the effects of famine; so one of the dystopian visions of the ‘Dann’ novels is the reduction of the human subject to prey. So how can we assess the philosophical centre of the ‘Dann’ novels? Fears of an ignorance of history are invoked. An unexplained reverence for the artefacts of past cultures, for objects, things, is substituted for an ability to interpret historical forces. The formulas of story-telling (the ‘happily ever after’) replace open-ended historical critique. Griot goes into the wilderness that he may test his voice in readiness for his return to the community of soldiers to sing tales of the good hero, Dann, in conflict with mutations and beings which, for the most part, stand in for the fabular creations of myth ‘proper’. Here, as the fiction reaches its point of closure, is a re-working and repetition of the old allegiance to a thane, lord or elder in pre-capitalist societies. Dann is also a dyadic figure. His psychology contains the good man and the evil man, ethical paradigms absorbed in the course of narrative encounters with Gemini figures, that is to say, ‘good’ and ‘evil’ men who by their actions at key moments in the plot change Dann’s life’s direction. This is a skilful adaptation on Lessing’s part of the foundational, basically Christian, notions of good and evil addressed by Nietzsche, notions

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which form the bedrock of the folktale paradigm which is revised in the Dann novels and adapted to twenty-first century conditions of thought. However, motivated by the idea and fact of extreme climate change, does Lessing’s novel threaten to sidestep the rigours of ‘postnatural’ critique and in doing so announce its own redundancy as eco-political fiction? Centrally, there is a seeming Africa. It can be asked, to what extent is ‘Ifrik’ a problematic identification? Is Mara and Dann in particular a book that avoids Africa? And is the representation of Africa as Ifrik itself an act of dismissal, even of erasure, or do the Dann novels play out a new version of Africa as a place of beginnings? (‘Imrik’, it must be said, is entirely marginal in these narratives). In the Dann novels ‘Ifrik’ is always already inhabited. Traces of previous habitation are highlighted in the narrative, in connection with ideas of memory and forgetting, knowledge and power, and to this end Mara and Dann in particular offers an abundance of metaphors for the fragility of civilization (the ruins, the Sand Library, the dwellings under the sea) in relation to non-human nature. Here, then, as we would expect, landscape and history are shown to be not separable. They are continuous and protean, always in process. Ecologies and imagined ecologies alike refuse the idea of closure, characterized instead as rhizomic proliferating responses to rhizomic proliferating conditions. The ‘cradle of civilization’ is inscribed as having its end in its beginning. A snapshot of Africa (would it be desirable to talk of a ‘snapshot’ of Europe?) is universally available in a recent report on climate change called ‘Africa – Up in Smoke?’ A Foreword by Archbishop Desmond Tutu draws attention to fundamental political, social and economic inequities that underpin environmental and postcolonial debates: The world’s wealthiest countries have emitted more than their fair share of greenhouse gases. Resultant floods, droughts and other climate change impacts continue to fall disproportionately on the world’s poorest people and countries, many of which are in Africa. (Simms and Reid 1) There is a corresponding increase in the pressure on natural resources. The recommendations made in this report focus on the need for agricultural reforms (in the light of diminishing natural resources and a volatile natural environment), and the deployment of appropriate technologies, combined with criticism of unfair international trade regulations and burdensome debt. In addition, the report identifies the problems affecting women in Africa who, despite their centrality to food production and the maintenance of families, suffer inequalities that exacerbate poverty.

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It identifies the pressures placed on natural resources by conflict and migration. It concludes by outlining the extent to which, at the time of writing, promises of aid by developed ‘high-polluting’ nations to the least developed countries and small island developing states have not materialized. These are the short-term and long-term effects of capitalist imperatives and colonialism. When the focus is on natural disaster, critical judgements must acknowledge, as Žižek points out, that ‘natural catastrophe [repeats] itself as social catastrophe’ (Violence 81).1 Lessing’s Dann novels re-imagine Africa by imagining the disturbances to diverse human communities challenged by, on the one hand, drought and desertification and, on the other, war, starvation and privation in the planetary remains – remains of community, of family, of knowledge – after the next ice age. The force of Žižek’s observation, with the critique that develops from it on the nature of ‘capitalist dynamics, a “nature” much more threatening and violent than all the hurricanes and earthquakes’ would seem, then, to underpin the effort of imagining Ifrik (Violence 82). Even so, particularly in Mara and Dann, Ifrik is a space to be mapped, literally, by the progress of two privileged individuals whose survival is time and time again implicitly accounted for by their ‘character’, perceived as an inherited trait and the inerasable evidence of their ruling class, and racial, superiority. The ‘happily ever after’ will depend on this and to a significant degree subverts the effort of eco-political critique. It can be asked further, whether, or to what extent, in these ‘environmental fables’ of future catastrophe, both ecological and political, Lessing prompts an examination of critical responsibility. Indeed, this discussion has its origins in speculation about the eco-political narrative as a feature of Lessing’s work. It now asks, if Lessing expects us to read in the full glare of our awareness of climate change prompted by the industrial cultures (or, if we are sceptical of the claims made by environmentalists regarding human interventions, in the face of the real evidence of natural climate change), to what extent Lessing also manipulates, even satirizes, the conceptual pleasures of the fantasy journey back to nature, from culture, which characterizes a great deal of nature writing. The reverse fear is again succinctly presented by Žižek, writing about accounts of social breakdown in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, when it is suggested that, ‘A fear permeates our lives that this kind of disintegration of the entire social fabric can come at any time, that some natural or technological accident . . . will reduce our world to a primitive wilderness’ (Violence 79). Lessing is not the only contemporary writer to wonder whether this reduction to ‘primitive wilderness’ might not produce a new kind of heroism.

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Lessing’s Dann novels highlight the frailty of advanced technology in the face of climate change (induced by so-called developed cultures in tandem with natural causes). ‘Natural’ planetary transformation threatens to underline human irrelevance against the grain of manifold versions of human centrality and superiority – the species might end, but the planet survives. It could be concluded that the Dann novels are not eco-political in the sense that particular positions are showcased, tested or set in opposition to a counterview. They do, however, give visibility to the body of the earth produced in a context where non-human nature, figured as denigrated Other, becomes sublimely terrorizing and narratively central. Furthermore, the space of imagining here becomes the site of a highly particular reversal of the repressions of ordinary existence – in particular the illusion of human mastery that rests on the repression of (the consequences of) climate change, and the challenge to history that it embodies.

Note 1

Žižek’s immediate concern is with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Works Cited Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring (1962; rpt with a new Afterword 1999) London: Penguin, 2000. Carson, Rachel. The Edge of the Sea, illus. Robert W. Hines. London: Staples Press, 1955. Flannery, Tim. The Weather Makers. London: Penguin, 2005. Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. Abingdon: Routledge, 2004. Kerridge, Richard and Neil Sammells. eds. Writing the Environment. London: Zed Books, 1998. Lessing, Doris. The Four-Gated City. 1972. London: Grafton, 1988. —1983. The Making of the Representative For Planet 8. London: Grafton, 1985. —Mara and Dann. London: Flamingo, 1999. —The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog. London: Harper Perennial, 2006. —The Wind Blows Away Our Words. London: Pan Books, 1987. Lyotard, Jean-François. ‘A Postmodern Fable’. In Postmodern Debates. Ed. Simon Malpas. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. pp. 12–22. Mazel, David. American Literary Environmentalism. Athens, Georgia, & London: University of Georgia Press, 2000. McKibben, Bill. The End of Nature. London: Penguin, 1990. Murphy, Patrick D. ‘The Non-Alibi of Alien Scapes: SF and Ecocriticism’. Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism. Eds. K. Armbruster and

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K. R. Wallace. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2001. pp. 263–78. Osborne, Peter. ed. A Critical Sense: Interviews with Intellectuals. London: Routledge, 1996. Simms, Andrew and Hannah Reid. ‘Africa – Up in Smoke? The Second Report from the Working Group on Climate Change’. London: The New Economics Foundation, June 2005. Žižek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. London and Cambridge, Mass: MIT, 1992. —Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books, 2008.

Chapter 9

The Porous Border Between Fact and Fiction, Empathy and Identification in Doris Lessing’s The Cleft Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis University of Ottawa, Canada

As she approaches the end of her ninth decade, Doris Lessing continues to search for new and appropriate forms to express her late life creativity.1 Very often these forms are experimental and exploratory, involving the crossing of various kinds of boundaries, of genre, gender and even of species.2 These crossings almost invariably involve characters in difficult or painful experiences that detach them from old ways of thinking or being and open them up to the possibility of new kinds of speculation and growth. In this essay I argue that in The Cleft (2007) Lessing portrays the porous nature of all three borders, genre, gender and species, in her fabular tale of the supposedly first people, the all female Clefts, and their offspring, the first males. The crucial feature of the fable that mediates the reader’s response to the gender stereotyped ‘pre-people’ characteristics of the Clefts and males3 is its narration through the lens of the older Roman Senator and historian, Transit. Transit’s narrative, itself a genre crossing combination of fact and fiction, history and literature, fits what Linda Hutcheon calls ‘historiographic metafiction’ – postmodern novels that ‘are intensely self-reflexive but that also both re-introduce historical context into metafiction and problematize the entire question of historical knowledge’ (285–6). Transit’s narrative raises the very questions about the history/literature divide and the borders of truth/fact/fiction that Hutcheon addresses in her discussion of the status of historiographic metafiction.4 Transit’s memoir, set in the context of first century Rome, both constructs and questions the gender assumptions of his time, while his struggles to narrate the Clefts’ story from surviving millennia-old fragments capture an historian’s efforts to decipher, verify and interpret his material. Both narrative layers suggest

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the porous border between history and fiction. Indeed we will see below that Transit is self-consciously aware that the ancient scrolls he is working with are already the product of interpretation and fiction-making.5 In working with these ancient fragments, Transit must struggle with not only the remoteness of the records of the Clefts but also with the horrific nature of the story that they tell – the atrocities that result from the Clefts’ sudden new capacity to give birth to male children. Because these records deal with two levels of trauma – the Clefts’ response to overwhelming, traumatic change and the males’ response to physical and psychological abuse – Transit’s role as a historian is a complex one. He must respond with sensitivity to the brutal events described without becoming too implicated in their horrors. Dominick LaCapra calls this difficult narrative task ‘empathetic unsettlement’. This ‘desirable empathy’ (102) involves a ‘mode of representation . . . that inhibits or prevents extreme objectification and harmonizing narratives’ (103). Objectification ‘denies or forecloses empathy’ (40), by distancing or detaching us from others’ horrific experiences so that we do not need to be made uncomfortable by their pain. Harmonizing narratives are those narrations of extreme events ‘from which we derive reassurance or a benefit’ (41–2), using the terrible suffering of others for our own well-being – for example, for ‘something career-enhancing, “spiritually” uplifting, or identity-forming for oneself or one’s group’ (99). I will argue that Transit, like the responsible historians of extreme events discussed by LaCapra, manages (usually) to create an experience of ‘empathetic unsettlement’ in which he and the reader feel empathy for the traumatic experience of both the Clefts and the Monsters without loosing their objectivity or trying to use the tales for their own advantage.6 Because we see the Clefts and males’ difficult journey to individualized personhood through the lens of Transit’s (usually) balanced empathy and detachment, we come to appreciate not only Transit’s struggles to understand his material but also the early peoples’ own slow development of the capacity to empathize with each other. Further we gradually also come to understand that in wrestling with this highly charged, gendered material, Transit’s own understanding of his relationship to the gender attitudes of his day is changed. Before examining further the implications of LaCapra’s formulation of empathetic unsettlement for Transit’s relationship to his historical material, I want to examine the psychological theory underpinning the concept of empathy. The traditional explanation of empathy rests on the individual’s ability to share and comprehend the inner experience of another, particularly if he or she has undergone a similar experience. This knowing ‘is based to a great extent on remembered, corresponding, affective states

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of one’s own’ (Schafer, qtd Jordan 154). Empathy has both an emotional component and a cognitive one. It requires a balance of emotion and thought, objectivity and subjectivity. The individual must be capable of easing up the boundaries of self in order to allow the ‘trying out quality to the experience, whereby one places one’s self in the other’s shoes or looks through the other’s eyes’ (Jordan 155). ‘[D]istinctions between self and other blur experientially’ (Jordan 155). However, this vicarious experience of the other’s emotions is temporary, followed by a return to one’s own feelings and needs. Further, one must be objective enough to understand what the other is feeling, not just to experience it emotionally. This balance of identification with the other’s emotions and cognitive understanding of them is necessary for successful empathetic response. To find this balance one must have self-boundaries that are not too rigid, and not too open (Jordan 155). If the boundaries of the self are too rigid, one will not be sufficiently open to the emotions of the other to experience them. One may misunderstand the other’s emotions or project one’s own onto them. Or one may experience the other’s emotions as a threat. Similarly if one’s self-boundaries are too open or weak, one will be engulfed by the feelings of the other and not be able to maintain or return to one’s own emotions and needs (Jordan 155). So a balance between identification with, and detachment from, the other is required for a successful empathetic response. With Lessing’s women focalizers the boundaries of self often tend to be porous and the women are often in danger of losing their self-identity in their empathetic response to the other. Anna Wulf’s over-identification with her lovers Michael and Saul Green in The Golden Notebook is an extreme example of this.7 For the male narrator examined here the boundaries of self tend to be more self-enclosed and need to be opened up to feel empathy for the other, especially for the other who is very different. Lessing expands the dimensions of the empathetic response by developing the possibilities for detachment. Detachment increases the range of aspects of the self and the other with which one can feel empathy. By allowing sufficient distance from the demands of the ego or the limitations in one’s self-understanding that block one’s responsiveness to the other, detachment facilitates the connection of empathy to otherwise denied or disassociated parts of the self and to an otherwise alien other.8 Thus detachment and empathy go hand in hand. Each kind of experience feeds and enables the other. What Lessing adds to this description of detachment is an awareness of deeper levels of self to which one can become attuned in both oneself and in the other. To reach these deeper levels of self

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requires discipline and effort and is often associated in Lessing’s work with undergoing a difficult or painful experience that detaches one from old ways of thinking or being (‘Navigating’ 52–3).9 The acquisition of this kind of detachment frees the individual not only to empathize more widely but also to see her world anew and to speculate and ask questions about it in ways that she could not have done before. We will see Transit undergoing this process of deepening detachment as he becomes exposed to painful aspects of the ancient records and of his own experiences and becomes capable of wider sympathies and greater questioning. In doing so his historical work becomes not only the compilation and interpretation of the Clefts’ ancient records but also the discovery (and at times invention) of the meaning of their experience and of his own. The reader too becomes implicated in the sorting out of truth from fiction in Transit’s story and his historical work. On one level we read the story of Transit’s attempt to accommodate himself to the records left by a people who lived millennia before his time and whose experiences and mindsets are radically different from his own. The ‘ancient scrolls and fragments of scrolls’ (60) that Transit must order and make sense of contain records of the oral tales of the first females, the Clefts, and the radical disruption of their lifestyle when they suddenly begin giving birth to male children. On another level these records plunge readers into the disturbing world of the highly gendered characteristics of the early Clefts and males. While Lessing gives primacy to such traits as the nurturing of children by the Clefts and their cooperative, peaceful life style, they are also slow, heavy, porpoise-like creatures who spend much of their time half in and half out of the sea, existing in a dreaming, almost totally unself-conscious state, ‘an eternal present’ (31). It is not by accident that these first females are usually referred to as Clefts, not women, throughout the ancient records. Thus as Lessing herself admits, the work is ‘not politically correct’ (qtd in Italie). Not only are the Clefts physically and mentally different from humans as we know them but also they are types rather than individualized characters, named for the functions they perform; that is, each cave ‘family’ consists of ‘the cleft Watchers, the Fish Catchers, the Net makers, the Fish Skin Curers, the Seaweed Collectors’ (10–11). The first males (first called Monsters, later called Squirts) bring another set of stereotypical features into this genetic soup. They are adventurous and daring but initially lack adult language and a full range of emotions. While they are more self-conscious than the early Clefts, being already one step away from these first people, they also lack individuality. Each group is powerfully driven by biological need. It is only when the two groups begin to mix, first physically and then

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more slowly culturally, that the resulting hybrid species begins to acquire the traits necessary for individualized human development – not only the ability to care for and perpetuate the species or to explore, adapt, and hunt but also the ability to self-consciously think, understand and empathize. Here again, as she did in The Fifth Child (1988) and Ben in the World (2000), Lessing blurs the boundaries between the human and the animal. In so doing she risks confusing or alienating her readers who do and do not identify with the Clefts and the Monsters.10 However, I believe Lessing gives the reader a clue on how to read her fable by setting the extreme gender descriptions found in the ancient mythic tales in the context of Transit’s metafictional tale of historiography. Thus we encounter the pre-human characteristics of the Clefts and males in the context of Transit’s own concern about how to respond appropriately to the disturbing nature of the collection of bits and fragments of records that he has acquired. From the beginning Transit must struggle with the porous border between fact and event, myth and history in the material with which he works.11 The ancient scrolls are themselves already an interpretation of the Cleft’s response to the sudden birth of the males. As Transit points out, the ‘official story’ recorded by the Clefts – ‘the one that they taught to their Memories’ (those responsible for passing down the oral history from generation to generation) – does not contain all the records that have been saved. A very early fragment, containing a ‘sickening’ account of the atrocities committed by the Clefts on the very first Monsters, was saved separately, presumably by a minority group and was never considered part of the official record (23–4). We will see below that Transit’s response to this contested early record blurs even further the border between fiction and history. The creation of the new hybrid species, the human race, out of the physical and cultural mixing of the Clefts and males comes only at the price of dealing with the shock and trauma of facing difference, of dealing with the alien other and gradually learning to accommodate to and then empathize with it. The reader too must face this shocking encounter with extreme gendered difference, and it is only Transit’s combination of objectivity and empathy towards the ancient records that makes possible the reader’s ability to understand and empathize with the slow growth into individualized personhood of the Clefts and males. However, some reviewers, put off by the accentuated, stereotypical sexual differences of the Clefts and the males in the old records, do not respond to Lessing’s use of Transit’s narrative as the vehicle for the ancient tale’s presentation.12 I will argue that Transit’s role is crucial to the metafictional layering of the novel. While

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Transit self-consciously struggles to make meaning of the ancient records, creating the story of the Clefts and males’ gradual growth through their painful interactions, Lessing’s fable captures the way Transit’s own selfunderstanding changes through his encounters with the old records. Both the story of Transit’s individual growth in perspective and the story he tells of the species-like growth of the Clefts and males come together in Lessing’s carefully orchestrated narrative of the encounter of genders and cultures and the rich new selfhoods that result. The interplay between Transit’s growing empathy towards the women in his life and the lessening of differences between the gender extremes of the Clefts and the males in the story of the ancient records he crafts is, I believe, the whole point of Lessing’s fiction – that is, both Transit and the Clefts and males grow in their ability to empathize with the other gender. Lessing has previously used this pattern of a more evolved narrator who is himself changed by his interaction with a less advanced civilization in Shikasta, although Johor is not only affected by his involvement with Shikastan archives but also directly intervenes in Shikastan reality.13 Transit plays the subtler role of the historian whose attempt to make meaning out of humankind’s first records both changes him and the narrative he puts together and may or may not affect the understanding of his civilization. But as with Shikasta, Lessing here seems to be also attempting to influence the understanding of her readers, wryly suggesting that our own gender attitudes may prevent us from acquiring the deeper level of human understanding that sees us all as ‘One – one Race or People’ (24).14 The kind of changes that are necessary for the birth in the Clefts of what Geraldine Bedell calls ‘person-hood’ are not easily accomplished. The written records of the Clefts’ oral tales capturing the moment when the females suddenly begin giving birth to males involve horrors of a kind not easily dealt with by Transit or the reader. One of the most interesting features of Transit’s role as narrator is his wrestling with the problems of an historian dealing with personal accounts of extreme or limit events. Transit possesses or learns to acquire the balanced empathy that, as I mentioned above, historian Dominick LaCapra advocates for historians dealing with such sensitive material – an empathy that is ‘responsive to the traumatic experience of others’ without appropriating their experience (41). To do this Transit must engage with the kind of issues raised by LaCapra in dealing with personal accounts of traumatic narratives. For example, LaCapra discusses the danger for the historian of over-identifying with traumatic material, especially eye witness accounts, and experiencing a ‘secondary or muted trauma’ (102). LaCapra notes that the use of ‘objectification within limits’ serves as ‘a protection of

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the researcher especially in areas in which traumatic suffering is marked and the tendency to identify fully with the victim may be compelling’ (100). Transit confronts this problem when he begins recording the birth of the first Monsters and the Clefts’ cruel treatment of them – most were put out to die, a few were kept as pets and mutilated. Transit seems to be consciously working at finding the balance between objectivity and identification advocated by LaCapra. Transit stresses both his identification with and his separateness from his material. He notes ‘I am writing this, feeling some of those ancient long ago emotions. I note that Maire [the Cleft narrating this incident] in her account said ‘we’ and ‘us’ identifying with the first Clefts, just as I cannot help identifying with the very first males’ (23). However, like a responsible historian, Transit is ‘actively aware . . . of the need to come to terms with . . . [his] implication in, or transferential relation to, charged, value-related events and those involved with them’ (LaCapra 105). Thus Transit is able to step back from his identification with the first males and to bring both empathy and objectivity to his account of the early Clefts’ cruelty towards the first baby boys. As he concludes, ‘Shock after shock was felt by this community of dreaming creatures and it was their helpless panic that caused their cruelty’ (33). Here Transit seems to satisfy LaCapra’s comment that empathy is ‘on some level necessary for understanding’ (105). It seems clear that Transit would not have been able to respond to these early records at all if he had not been capable of both detachment from his identification with the Monsters and some empathy towards the early behaviour of the Clefts. However, the balance of detachment and empathy is not always enough or even possible. The blurring of the relationship between fiction and history, identified by Hutcheon as germane to historiographic metafiction, is intensified by Transit’s response to the first brutal fragment already left out of the Cleft’s official records. While Transit chooses not to include this first fragment of the Clefts ‘told by someone in shock’ which details the ‘sickening’ ingenuity of ‘the cruelties thought up by the old females’ (21), he does not leave it out because he thinks it is exaggerated or inaccurate. Rather he accepts the authenticity of this record – ‘there is something too raw and bleeding about the account of the cruelties to be fake’ (24) – but still avoids including it. ‘It is too unpleasant. I am a Monster and cannot help identifying with those long-ago tortured infants, the first baby boys’ (21). Here Transit’s reaction suggests that this first fragment induces too strong a secondary trauma for him to cope with it. Thus his account reminds the reader of how porous the border is between fiction and history, identification and detachment. Moreover, the fact that the official

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records of the Clefts had already left out this brutal first fragment suggests exactly what historians beginning with Hayden White have been at pains to point out – that history is based on records which are themselves the product of interpretation.15 Transit’s self-conscious struggle as he works at turning the ancient scrolls into a comprehensible narrative is highlighted often and variously. Despite his generally empathetic response to the Clefts’ early records (with the exception of that first fragment), Transit makes it clear, however, that he feels a certain distance from his material. This distance, I feel, is crucial to the reader’s acceptance of Transit’s historical efforts. He describes himself as having a tendency towards ‘scepticism’, which, he feels, ‘has made me able to take on the task of telling the tale of our real origins’, a tale which ‘does have elements of legend’ (27). His acknowledgement of the fabular quality of the ancient records aids his detachment and is crucial to his ability to work with the disturbing documents.16 While an historian’s total objectivity in interpreting the past is now viewed with suspicion,17 Transit’s believability is strengthened by his ability to detach himself to some extent from the gender attitudes of his time. He notes, ‘I have always found it entertaining that females are worshipped as goddesses, while in ordinary life they are kept secondary and thought inferior’ (27). This detachment aids Transit’s conscious avoidance of over-identifying with his material or assuming the voice of the victim (whether Cleft or Monster) – tendencies mentioned by LaCapra as inappropriate for developing ‘an ethics of response for secondary witnesses’ (98). His scepticism also identifies Transit’s sophistication as an historian aware of the, at least partially, fictive nature of historical narrative. Transit’s sophistication and awareness are immediately seen in his interpretation of the first fragment that he includes: ‘a record of an interrogation by one of us – that is, the males . . . – of a She, or Cleft’ (25). Transit immediately notes that the ‘interrogator is in a position of power; and that locates it late in our long history’ (25), but it is ‘preserved by the method used by the females, the memorising of a history’ and this places it among ‘very early events indeed’ (25). So this is a late example of preserving ancient oral history. Here Transit’s response to his material is both sensitive and discriminating. Rather then responding to this material in a purely objective manner, using what LaCapra calls ‘excessive objectification’ (99), Transit seeks to be sensitive to the subject position and voice of the records. Transit also acknowledges the role of ideology in preserving historical memory.18 Noting that the ancient records have been kept locked up in ‘prison’ and some of them even destroyed not only because of the violence

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they contain but also because of their controversial account of the beginning of the human race, Transit concludes, ‘[p]erhaps it has been felt that an account of our beginnings that makes females the first and founding stock is unacceptable’ (27). Transit’s comment here acquires a deeper irony as some early reviewers of the novel also felt it unacceptable to portray the first humans as porpoise-like females, lacking curiosity or daring.19 Transit’s scepticism and irony are clear in his comparisons of the Cleft’s account with two alternative contemporary creation stories. Regarding the official story taught in the Roman schools in which ‘males were the first in the story and in some remarkable way brought forth the females’ (25), Transit ironically comments that it remains ‘unexplained’ how this was accomplished (26). Regarding the creation story current in the new Christian ‘sect’ – ‘the first female was brought forth from the body of a male’ – Transit ironically remarks, ‘[s]ome male invented that – the exact opposite of the truth’ (27). Here Lessing foregrounds the cultural and ideological input in foundational records from the past and deliberately points to her rewriting of the Biblical story of Adam and Eve (as well as Roman creation myths). In doing so she uses the kind of parodic postmodern intertexuality associated with historiographic metafiction that ‘uses and abuses those intertexual echoes, inscribing their powerful allusions and then subverting that power through irony’ (Hutcheon 298). Similarly Lessing plays with Transit’s attachment to the goddesses Artemis and Diana and his use of them to try to understand the power of Maire, the first Cleft to visit and mate with the males. The power of this illusion is then undercut as Transit muses that ‘[i]t is not possible to imagine anything that could banish Artemis, or for that matter pretty Diana, from their positions in our hearts’ (117). Both Transit and his creator are clearly aware that myths of origin have ideological implications. However, it is the ideological implications of Lessing’s focus on gender in her mythic story that have bothered some of her critics. Lessing, however, is, I believe, both more sophisticated and more even-handed in her creation of a gendered myth of origins than some of her detractors have realized. The primacy of her first female proto-humans is balanced by their links to their sea creature past. The liveliness and curiosity of the first males is balanced by their neediness and vulnerability. Lessing herself comments on the relationship between the genders in the book by noting that while the males ‘pep up’ the genetic soup of humanity, they were ‘a haphazard species’ who always needed to be looked after and died ‘much too easy’ (‘What Use Are Men?’). The real point of her myth of origins, however, as we shall see, is the absolute interdependence of the Clefts and males for the creation and then the evolution of the human race.

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As in The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five, isolation or attitudes of superiority by one group, whether it is defined by gender or by territory, leads to the malaise of all. Indeed a comparison of Marriages and The Cleft is very instructional. In both books the boundaries erected by human arrogance or fear must be crossed if the human species is to survive. Thus Al*Ith must leave the security and comfort, but ultimate stagnation, of the seemingly utopian world of woman-centred Zone Three to learn to understand and eventually love the cruder, more militaristic but also less selfsatisfied and more questioning world of male-dominated Zone Four. Further Zone Three’s arrogance and xenophobia as well as Zone Four’s repressive laws and extreme militarization have hurt their own Zone’s wellbeing and that of the whole. Neither the highly evolved women of Zone Three nor the militaristic men of Zone Four, or for that matter the war-like woman-ruled tribes of Zone Five, can exist without the others. It is only when the boundaries between the territories and the gendered attitudes associated with them begin to give way and there is free movement between the zones that the well-being of the whole can be achieved. What perhaps makes Lessing’s later novel harder for some readers to deal with is that the Clefts are more primitive and closer to their sea creature forbearers than the slightly more evolved Monsters. As such the Clefts are more foundational and likely to survive but also less open to change and less creative in adjusting to new circumstances than the males. But, as in the earlier fable, both genders, albeit with modified versions of their characteristics, are necessary to the well-being and advancement of the human race. Boundaries must be literally and figuratively crossed as Al*Ith goes down to Zone Four and Maire goes over the mountain to the valley of the males. However, unlike the highly imaginative but little individualized story teller from Zone Three, who is very much in the background of his retrospective narrative, the more factually oriented, conservative historian, Transit, is very much in the foreground of his present tense narrative. Indeed Transit’s personal experience is crucial to his historical story telling. From the outset Transit makes it clear that he has been able to empathize with the ancient records in large part because of events in his own experience. He has young children from a much younger second wife, his first wife having died and his first two sons having been killed while fighting with the Roman army in the north. His early career involved little empathy for either his wife or sons. He was too ‘ambitious’, and, as Transit notes, I ‘had very little time for my wife and less for my boys’ (55). Aware now of the loss he has experienced in not having really known his first two sons, Transit spends many hours in the nursery observing his second family. It is his observation

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of his young daughter and son’s first discovery of their sexual differences and their different reactions – she is ‘shocked, envious, repelled’, he is proud and assertive of ‘his equipment’ (60) – that enables Transit to ‘at least try and take on . . . my history of that ancient, long-ago time’ (62). In his observation of his children and his study of the ancient texts, each makes the other more understandable. We see Transit’s openness to his material in his refusal to judge or assert superiority over the very early behaviour of the Clefts and males. When Maire and Astre, the first two Clefts to establish relations with the males, leave the valley of the males after their first visit with them, Transit records ‘[t]heir time for conception had come and gone (76) – though of course they had no idea of that’ (76). But then he immediately adds, ‘[b]ut when we say things like that now, “they did not know,” “they were so primitive,” “they were too ignorant” – the gamut of dismissing phrases – well I, for one, wonder. How do we know what they knew, and how?’ (76). Here Transit captures the ‘the process of attempting to assimilate’ the data of the past (rather than the actual assimilation) that Hutcheon claims is ‘foregrounded’ in historiographic metafiction (Hutcheon 295, [emphasis in original]). Transit leaves space in his account for, indeed emphasizes, what he and his civilization do not know or understand about the early Cleft’s knowledge. Transit’s self-conscious questioning of how much he really understands the gender relations in the Clefts’ story leaks into his telling of his own story. While Transit had laughed at the gender discrepancies in Roman attitudes toward women, Transit himself initially assumes the superiority of age, knowledge and experience over his much younger second wife, Julia, whom he describes as ‘a clever little provincial girl’ (56) who ‘was almost completely ignorant’ (57). However, as Transit works with the manuscripts of the Clefts and lovingly observes the development of his second family, he also observes Julia’s increasingly non-traditional female behaviour – her lack of interest in nurturing her children, her socializing in sophisticated ruling circles, and her sexual promiscuity.20 At first he judges Julia harshly, comparing her ‘selfish, self-indulgent, amoral’ behaviour unfavourably with his mother’s virtue, ‘piety, and strength of character’ (59). When this has no effect on her, he settles for warning her to be careful in her promiscuous sexual life. Transit’s final reference to Julia, however, suggests a change in the dynamics of their relationship and in his attitude towards her. On this occasion it is she who warns him, spelling out the dangers of allowing rumours to circulate about building a new house – prominent people have had their houses confiscated by the current tyrant, Nero, she tells him. She concludes

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by shaking him and calling him a ‘foolish old thing’ (176). This scene forces Transit to become aware of how Julia really sees him; her exasperated tone and words suggest not the veneration he had assumed but impatience and annoyance at his lack of understanding of the current political realities about which she is very much aware. Even more interesting is the narrative placing of this personal digression. Transit includes the story of his scolding by Julia only after he has described late in his tale the great ‘rage’ between the Clefts and the males. At this stage in the records the interactions between the Clefts and males are considerably more organized and advanced with young boys staying with their mothers until around five or six, after which time they go off to live with the men and older boys in the valley by the great river. Maronna, the head of the Clefts at that time, and the male leader Horsa increasingly clash over the males’ carelessness in taking care of the little children (a number of boys die in the great river and other ways) and the men’s dislike of the women’s scolding and nagging (172). This rage, which Transit comes to realize was the culmination of a series of fights, finally leads Horsa to decide to go away for awhile with the men and boys on a great expedition. Transit’s ability to connect the Clefts’ impatience with the men’s behaviour to Julia’s scolding of him over the rumour of the new house suggests how his work with the records of the Clefts has opened him up to his own gender assumptions. What is most interesting for my purposes about Transit’s account of the great expedition and, in particular, the accident which cripples Horsa, is the porous nature of the history/fiction, detachment/identification divide in Transit’s response to Horsa’s accident. While Transit’s careful empathetic balance of detachment and identification in his treatment of the ancient records had been established in his earlier work, this balance is now temporarily lost. In describing Horsa’s feelings when he lies crippled on the sand, thrown back by waves after attempting to reach the far horizon, Transit is overcome with an identification so intense that it is balanced by no corresponding detachment. Exclaiming over the crippled Horsa, ‘I feel he is my younger self, perhaps even a son’ (215), Transit fails to maintain the objectivity identified by LaCapra as necessary to prevent the historian from falling into unrecognized transferences and projections (99). Transit assumes that Horsa’s desire to reach this new land is not because he aspired to ‘finer dimensions in life’, but rather because like the Romans, Horsa was a ‘coloniser’ at heart (216). Here Transit identifies Horsa’s pain with that of Rome itself, hurt in its need to expand (216). Thus Horsa’s suffering becomes that of Transit’s two sons, ‘lying somewhere

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in those northern forests’ (216), giving their lives so that Rome could ‘grow’, ‘reach out’, ‘outleap itself’ (216). Identifying Horsa’s suffering with the pain Rome has endured in its expansionist drive to increase its empire, Transit mourns anew for the death of his first two sons even as he celebrates Rome’s desire to extend its boundaries ‘far and further, wide and wider’ (216). Transit’s projection onto Horsa of his own feelings about the Roman Empire provides the reader with her own experience of ironic detachment from Transit’s narrative. As he rhetorically asks, ‘Why should there ever be an end to . . . Rome, to our boundaries?’ (216), the reader, of course, knows that soon enough Rome will fall to the Germanic tribes from the north. Thus after carefully establishing Transit’s balanced approach to his material, the novel here undercuts that reliability and ‘blurs the line between fiction and history’ (Hutcheon 293). Perhaps in showing Transit’s unbalanced identification with Rome’s imperialistic goals, Lessing is suggesting that humankind will take longer to come to terms with its imperialistic desires than with immature attitudes towards gender and sexuality that polarize the differences between the sexes. While the dangers of imperialism and sexism are often intertwined in Lessing’s work, increasingly in her oeuvre Lessing has come to concentrate more on the dangers of imperialism than of gender discrimination. While the early works seem to detail more fully the difficulties of sexism than of imperialism, the two seem to be balanced in The Marriages of Zones Two, Three, and Four in which, as mentioned above, the different genders are associated with different territories and stages of development, and the healing of the gender split is linked to the healing of the malaise gripping geographical regions and even species. But increasingly in her outer space and fabular fictions Lessing has suggested that the aggressive behaviour associated with imperial empires plays havoc with humankind’s ability to advance and to survive the grave challenges with which it is confronted, especially that of climate change.21 Whatever Transit’s imperialistic blindness, Lessing parallels the psychological development of mature gender attitudes in Transit’s life story to his account of the sexual and cultural evolution of the Clefts and males. In Transit’s personal life story we find a growing awareness that he and Julia are far more equal and in mutual need of each other than Transit originally imagined. Just as Julia presumably saves Transit’s life by warning him of the danger of rumours about building a new house, so earlier Transit had warned Julia of the danger of going to her lover’s wedding lavishly dressed, riding in an elegant chariot provided by the lover himself (149). Each needs the perspective and understanding of the other to survive.

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Similarly by the end of Transit’s narrative of the ancient records, Maronna, having screamed herself hoarse after learning of the death of most of the young boys on Horsa’s great expedition, can see and respond for the first time to the real grief that Horsa feels over their loss and can take him in her arms and comfort him. Similarly Horsa can get beyond his usual perception of Maronna as a critical, scolding presence and see her pain and vulnerability. Thus instead of feeling threatened and wanting to escape, he can reach out with tenderness to comfort her also. This moment of mutual succour and empathy marks the maturing of not only the two individuals, Maronna and Horsa, but also of the two peoples, the Clefts and males, into one people, the human race. Maronna and Horsa have widened the boundaries of self and become capable of experiencing the feelings of the other without losing their sense of self. As representative figures, their balance of identification and detachment implicitly suggests that the Clefts and the males will begin to understand not only that they need each other but also that they are capable of empathizing with each other. It is at this point that the rock containing the Cleft, the symbol of the one-dimensional identification of the Clefts with their sexuality, is destroyed and the women are forced to move to a more capacious beach symbolizing a more capacious sense of self. This event marks the end of the ancient scripts recording the division of the Clefts and males into two peoples based on their sexual difference. The splendid new beach to which the women had moved with the destruction of the Cleft would ‘soon house all the women and the children and the visiting men too’ (257). The careful balance of identification and detachment acquired by Transit in working with the ancient records of the Clefts (with a few exceptions), details the gradual lessening of the purely sexual identities of the Clefts and males and the growth of empathetic understanding between them. At the same time Transit reveals his personal progress in dealing with the gendered assumptions of his time. But the historical metafictional penchant for undercutting whatever values are established is still operative. Transit’s combined personal memoir and historical reconstruction will not prevent the fall of his society, and his imperialistic attitudes suggest that fall may be necessary. However, despite this obvious irony, Lessing’s prophetic voice is still able to emerge from this, at times, disturbing fabular fiction implicitly demanding that we cast a speculative and detached eye on the gender assumptions governing our own civilization and become capable of seeing and questioning the imperialistic patterns obscured by familiarity and too little distance from the theatre of our lives. Here we see the ongoing creativity of Lessing’s late life writing as she continues to try out new experimental

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forms for goading her culture to question the stories it tells itself about gender relations and imperial ambitions.

Notes 1

2

3 4

5

6

7

8

9 10

11

12

See ‘Another Model of the Aging Writer: Sarton’s Politics of Old Age’ by Anne Wyatt-Brown in Aging and Gender in Literature. Wyatt-Brown offers three models for writers’ late life productivity. Lessing’s creativity in her late eighties seems to fit Wyatt-Brown’s second trajectory, that of writers ‘liberated by the possibility of radical change’ (52). See also my article ‘Navigating the Spiritual Cycle in Memoirs of a Survivor and Shikasta’ in which I argue that Lessing’s ‘move from inner-space to outer-space fiction . . . offers us a fascinating example of midlife creativity’ (47). See Susan Watkins’ article, ‘Writing in a Minor Key’, in which she discusses Lessing’s crossing of species boundaries in The Fifth Child (1988) and Ben in the World (2000) and its effect on the reader, especially in England. The phrase ‘pre-people’ comes from Geraldine Bedell’s review in The Observer. See Linda Hutcheon’s article ‘“The Pastime of Past Time”: Fiction, History, Historiographic Metafiction’ where she defines the postmodern nature of this generic category and then discusses its relation to historical fiction and earlier, traditional notions of the verifiability of history. See Hayden White’s discussion of the fictionality of all texts available to the historian in ‘The Historical Text as Literary Artifact’ (42). Jeanie Warnock’s fine application of LaCapra’s theory of ‘empathetic unsettlement’ to Shani Mootoo’s novel, Cereus Blooms at Night increased my interest in this theory and encouraged me to go back and reread LaCapra. See my discussion of Anna’s precarious sense of self and her tendency to become submerged in the identities of those she loves in ‘Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook: Separation and Symbiosis’. Judith Jordan explains that the empathetic response is not global; the individual may respond to some aspects of the other or self but not others (155). See my discussion concerning accessing deeper levels of the self in ‘Navigating the Spiritual Cycle’ (50–9). Lessing herself discusses this in ‘An Ancient Way to New Freedom’ (54). In ‘Writing in a Minor Key’, Watkins makes a similar point about the effect of Lessing’s crossing of species boundaries in The Fifth Child and Ben in the World. See Whites’s distinction between event and fact (‘The Historical Text as Literary Artifact’, 43–4). See, for example, Ursula Le Guin’s interview, ‘Saved by a Squirt’, in The Guardian. For a more positive review see Lisa Appignanesi’s review ‘Unto them, a boy is born’ in The Times Online. Like my own reading, Appignanesi recognizes that ‘[w]hat distinguishes The Cleft is the hard edge of mirroring irony provided by her teller, an elderly historian in Nero’s Rome who sifts the fragments of ancient manuscripts in his villa while his much younger wife gambols off to orgies’. In her review in The Observer Geraldine Bedell notes that the Clefts are ‘pre-people, as they emerge fumblingly into what we might think of as people-hood’.

158 13

14

15 16

17

18

19

20

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See my discussion of Johor’s transformation in ‘Navigating the Spiritual Cycle’ (63–7). See also my earlier discussion of how Johor is changed in the process of compiling the documents that comprise Shikasta in ‘The Marriage of Inner and Outer Space’ (228–33). See ‘Navigating the Spiritual Cycle’ where I briefly discuss Lessing’s interest in Shikasta in influencing her readers (75–6). See Note 5. Readers of Lessing’s fable would do well to emulate Transit in this regard and similarly acknowledge the fabular quality of the tale. Watkins in ‘Writing in a Minor Key’ argues that Lessing’s more recent fabular works have often been misinterpreted by British critics because they fail to understand Lessing’s use of minor genres. See essays by Grossman and White in The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding. See Hutcheon’s discussion of the ideological implications of writing about history in historiographic metafictions (297, 300). As Ursula Le Guin comments in a review of The Cleft, ‘Women are passive, incurious, timid and instinctively nurturant; without men, they scarcely rise above animal mindlessness. Men are intellectual, inventive, daring, rash, independent, and need women only to relieve libido and breed more men’ (‘Saved by a Squirt’). A similar hint of the wide distribution of gender linked attributes within as well as between sexes is also found in the ancient records. Thus from the beginning there were Clefts who wanted to spend time in the Valley with the males and men who enjoyed caring for children and being with the Clefts in the caves (143–4, 162 ). See, for example, the dangers of imperialism in association with climate change outweighing gender problems in Mara and Dann (1999) and its sequel, The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog (2005), as well as in ‘The Reason for It’ in The Grandmothers (2003). Fiona Becket’s discussion in the previous chapter explores this theme further.

Works Cited Appignanesi, Lisa. ‘Unto Them, a Boy Is Born’. Rev. of The Cleft by Doris Lessing. Times Online 6 Jan 2007. http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/fiction/article1289421.ece [Web. 13 Aug 2007]. Bedell, Geraldine. Rev. of The Cleft by Doris Lessing. Observer 7 Jan 2007. http:// books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,,1984239,00.html [Web. 13 Aug 2007]. Canary, Robert H. and Henry Kozicki. eds. The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1978. Grossman, Lionel. ‘History and Literature: Reproduction or Signification’. In Canary and Kozicki, pp. 1–40. Hutcheon, Linda. ‘“The Pastime of Past Time”: Fiction, History, Historiographic Metafiction’. Genre, 20 (Fall–Winter 1987), 285–305.

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Italie, Hillel. ‘This Writer won’t Settle Down’. Los Angeles Times: Calendarlive.com 20 February 2006. www.calendarlive.com/books/cl-et- lessing20oct20,0,724190. story?coll=cl-books-util [Web. 20 Feb 2006]. Jordan, Judith. ‘Empathy and Self Boundaries’. In Roman, Juhasz and Miller, The Women and Language Debate. pp. 153–64. LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 2001. Le Guin, Ursula. ‘Saved by a Squirt’. Rev. of The Cleft by Doris Lessing. Guardian Unlimited 10 Feb 2007. http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/ 0,,2009447,00.html [Web. 13 Aug 2007]. Lessing, Doris. ‘An Ancient Way to New Freedom’. The Diffusion of Sufi Ideas in the West. Ed. L. Lewin. Boulder, CO: Keysign, 1972. pp. 44–54. —Ben in the World. London: Flamingo, 2000. —The Cleft. London: Fourth Estate (HarperCollins), 2007. —The Fifth Child. 1988. London: Flamingo, 1993. —The Golden Notebook. 1962. New York: Bantam, 1973. —Mara and Dann: an Adventure. New York: HarperFlamingo, 1999. —The Memoirs of a Survivor. 1974. New York: Vintage, 1988. —Re: Colonized Planet 5: Shikasta. Vol. 1 of Canopus in Argos: Archives. 1979. London: Granada, 1980. —‘The Reason For It’. The Grandmothers. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. pp. 131–89. — The Story of General Dann, and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog. London: Fourth Estate, 2005. Perrakis, Phyllis Sternberg. ‘Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook: Separation and Symbiosis’. American Imago 38.4 (Winter, 1981): 407–28. —‘Navigating the Spiritual Cycle in Memoirs of a Survivor and Shikasta’. In Adventures of the Spirit: The Older Woman in the Works of Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and Other Contemporary Women Writers. Ed. Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis. Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP, 2007. pp. 47–82. — ‘The Marriage of Inner and Outer Space in Doris Lessing’s Shikasta’. ScienceFiction Studies, 17.2 (July 1990), pp. 221–38. Roman, Camille, Suzanne Juhasz and Christanne Miller. eds. The Women and Language Debate: A Sourcebook. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1994. Warnock, Jeanie. ‘“Soul Murder” and Rebirth: Trauma, Narrative, and Imagination in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night’. Perrakis, Adventures of the Spirit. pp. 270–98. Watkins, Susan. ‘Writing in a Minor Key’. Doris Lessing Studies, 25.2 (Winter 2006), 6–10. ‘“What Use Are Men?” asks Lessing’. BBC News/Wales. 2 June 2007. http://news.bbc. co.uk/2/low/uk_news/wales/6715227.stm [Web. 9 Feb 2008]. White, Hayden. ‘The Historical Text as Literary Artifact’. In Canary and Kozicki, pp. 41–62. Wyatt-Brown, Anne M. ‘Another Model of the Aging Writer: Sarton’s Politics of Old Age’. Aging and Gender in Literature: Studies in Creativity. Ed. Anne M. WyattBrown and Janice Rossen. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1993. pp. 49–60.

Afterword: Encompassing Lessing Judith Kegan Gardiner University of Illinois, Chicago

With the award of the Nobel Prize, Doris Lessing seems to be achieving a critical reputation commensurate with her long and distinguished career. This volume of scholarly essays on Doris Lessing’s border crossings illuminates her scope and achievements, just at the time she has announced that her 2008 novel, Alfred and Emily, will be her last. As Alice Ridout and Susan Watkins say in their introduction, this book ‘takes as its starting point Lessing’s resistance to categorization and her persistent impulse to cross borders of all kinds in her work and life’ (2). It addresses her literary evolution and her travels across borders ‘geographical, ideological and generic’ (3). Given her sixty years of productivity and publication of over fifty volumes, providing a comprehensive overview is no easy task. However, this volume succeeds in offering insightful new essays about her writings from earliest to latest. These nine substantial chapters are arranged in chronological order, according to the works by Lessing that they explicate. They highlight her astonishing range and demonstrate how the perspectives of contemporary poststructuralist thinkers can revise past understandings of her work, referring to, among others, Homi Bhabha, Pierre Bourdieu, Bertolt Brecht, Rachel Carson, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Emmanuel Levinas, Georg Lukács, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adrienne Rich, Yi-Fu Tuan and Slavoj Žižek. Their approaches are political, psychological, ecological and aesthetic. Thus the present volume significantly advances the daunting project of assessing Lessing’s work as a whole. Although, as Ridout and Watkins suggest, Lessing is a border-crosser whose work is full of ‘contradictions and controversies’ (2), I find myself more struck in this overview by the unity of her world and the convergent interests of herself and this group of scholars. For me, such convergence is particularly manifest in reading the present volume in the light of Lessing’s most recent fiction, Alfred and Emily.

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Throughout her work, Lessing creates alternative realities. This is as true in her more apparently realistic fictions and essays as in the fantastic fables and space fictions. Whether set in England, Africa or a freezing planet distant in time and space, Lessing’s characters share a familiar psychology, harbour similar emotions, work through similar conflicts and express themselves largely in similar colloquial English as they attempt to cope with varying and often traumatic social contexts. And speaking in the reader’s ear is often the same narrative voice, that of an observer who has grown wiser, more disillusioned, from watching a constant human nature face the vicissitudes of unjust societies, violent histories and the crushingly personal effects of impersonal nature. In Alfred and Emily, Lessing herself engages in retrospection, both about her writing and her life. The novella takes the form of an alternative biography of her parents, set in an alternative twentieth century in which England lives in perpetual peace. Alfred and Emily, like The Golden Notebook (1962) and many other Lessing fictions, develops its alternative reality by placing familiar people in a transformed social context. And here Lessing deliberately reveals the back story, the personal autobiographical events as she now interprets them, that drive her desires for altering the inevitable past. She thus rewrites, paradoxically, the guilts of the omniscient narrator. In Alfred and Emily, Lessing remembers her broken, depressed and defeated parents as they appeared to her childhood in a sunny colonial Africa. Preceding this memoir is the happier fictionalized alternative, happier for the individuals and for the English nation. She imagines her parents’ lives had World War I never occurred, had her father remained an athletic English farmer, rather than becoming a bureaucrat, then a war invalid, and later a colonist in Southern Africa, and had her mother remained in England as an efficient nurse administrator, married a successful doctor rather than Lessing’s father, and become a storyteller and philanthropist as a rich, childless widow rather than a sad, manipulative neurotic. Unlike most fantasies of one’s parents in their youth, Lessing’s mismatched parents never marry each other or bear children together. Instead, she creates a different wife for her father and comments, ‘I enjoyed giving him someone warm and loving’, thus striking another posthumous Oedipal blow at her cold mother (Lessing 140). The most striking result of this alternative scenario, of course, is that it leads to Doris Tayler’s non-existence at the same time that it analyses the springs of Lessing’s creativity and the continuing sources of her imaginative energy. Contemplating one’s death is not a surprising preoccupation for a nonagenarian, but in Lessing it takes the paradoxical form of contemplating one’s never having been born, perhaps with an

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implicitly consoling conclusion like that of It’s a Wonderful Life, the 1946 Frank Capra movie starring Jimmy Stewart in which post-World War II trauma is countered with the reverse wish fulfilment of how much worse the world would be had the protagonist never been born. Yet, even minus herself, Alfred and Emily and the autobiographical sketches that accompany it are full of Lessing’s continuing themes of family, gender and generation, themes that the scholars in this volume develop in original directions. ‘So much has been written about mothers and daughters, and some of it by me’, Lessing writes, asserting that ‘nothing has ever much changed’ since her own childhood regarding the ‘elemental rivalry’ between female generations (178–9). And, like Alfred and Emily, the chapters in this volume pay little attention to heterosexual relationships, sex and love, focusing instead on familial bonds and their political implications. In the loose collection of autobiographical sketches following the novella in Alfred and Emily, Lessing catalogues for us two kinds of nourishment from her childhood, mentioning them as though they are parallel in importance – the books she loved to read, from Little Women to War and Peace, and the food rations destined, respectively, for the white colonial household and for their African servants. In her chapter in the present volume on ‘Horrors of the Breast’, Edith Frampton picks up the ambivalence Lessing expresses in her first novel, The Grass is Singing (1950) towards the first food, breast milk, and towards the colonized Africans she lived among. According to Frampton, Julia Kristeva’s theories about our culture’s abjection of the maternal body help read the horror and desire that the novel’s protagonist feels at watching an African woman breastfeed. According to Frampton, ultimately ‘Mary Turner rejects the symbolic order in favour of the abject, an abject that has been re-membered as the comforting breast of a mother, welcoming Mary, horrifically, to her death’ (23). Throughout Lessing’s fiction, longing for maternal nurturance and longing to be a nurturing mother ambivalently struggle with distaste for the actual work of mothering and desperate antagonism toward engulfing mothers ‘who cannot let their children go’ (Alfred and Emily 191). Ruth Robbins, like Frampton, turns to Kristeva’s theories of abjection to connect Lessing’s treatment of maternity with both her narrative strategies and her social critique. Lessing’s The Fifth Child (1988), she claims, with its focus on a mother unable to deal with a deviant, perhaps monstrous child, acts to ‘unsettle the reader’ with its messy narrative of birth and reproduction. Robbins argues that the novel dramatizes conflicts in bourgeois ideology and economics that ‘drastically call into question the liberal ideals of family in the West’ (95). Told from the mother’s viewpoint, the mother/child

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story here ‘modifies the cultural ideal. It breaks the frame, crosses generic boundaries; it messes with genre’ (95). Themes of the individual life course, the relations between parents and children, and the permeable boundaries of genre feature prominently not only in Alfred and Emily but also in Roberta Rubenstein’s chapter on ‘Doris Lessing’s Fantastic Children’ and Susan Watkins’ chapter on Lessing’s pseudonymous Jane Somers novels. Rubenstein stresses the generic hybridity of Lessing’s fictions of 1969–88, which feature characters who are themselves hybrids, poised between fabular and realistic portrayals. According to Rubenstein, ‘Lessing’s fantastic children reflect not only her interest in borders and hybrid forms but the progressive darkening of her view of the potentiality for positive social transformation’ (72). The liminal child figures in these fictions range from the prophetic psychics of The Four-Gated City (1969) to the feral children of Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) to the atavistic Ben in The Fifth Child. These portrayals, Rubenstein claims, raise ‘moral and social questions about the construction of normalcy, family life, and maternal responsibility’ when ‘the transgressive Other is embodied not as an abstract concept . . . but as an agent of disintegration’ within the family itself (71). Susan Watkins’ chapter on ‘The “Jane Somers” Hoax’ continues the analyses so prominent in Alfred and Emily of mother–daughter bonds, women’s creativity and the challenges of aging. As Lessing ages, so have many of her protagonists, though she also comments on the ‘impossibility of making sense of Time in its boundaries’ (159). Watkins shows Lessing critiquing those aspects of contemporary culture that market youth and beauty as part of the packaging of the successful woman writer. Lessing’s focal woman journalist performs her femininity so as to demonstrate ‘the relationship between gender, authorship and commercial culture’ (77). Though masquerading as naïve realism, Watkins claims, the Somers novels exhibit considerable generic and formal complexity. Moreover, she argues that in the Somers novels Lessing questions the assumed ‘association between realism, “authenticity” and women’s writing’ and satirizes the ‘unthinking conflation of the narrator with the author in the reading and promotion of realist texts’ by women (83, 85). This deliberate teasing of the readers’ desires to collapse fiction into autobiography pervades The Golden Notebook and is even more striking in Alfred and Emily. Alice Ridout directly addresses Lessing’s autobiography Under My Skin (1994) in relation to the fiction and to Alfred and Emily as she expands on the identification of Lessing’s characters as ‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘Third Culture Kids’, marginal outsiders who come into their own as members of

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transnational communities (107). Separated from their societies of origin spatially, such characters may also be temporally displaced. Ridout notes that Lessing sometimes seems to drift from history into fable, privileging ‘the anecdotal’ over a history she can treat with only ‘“conditional respect” because so often “the actual participants keep their counsel” so that the way we publicly remember events is distorted’ (118). Clearly, Lessing’s desire to escape history’s over-determination is evident in her revisionary parental biographies of Alfred and Emily and in those ‘cosmopolitan’ characters Ridout describes as representatives of a ‘“future world reality” . . . reflected in the prophetic tone’ of The Four-Gated City and The Memoirs of a Survivor. These aspects of Lessing’s work, Ridout suggests, make Lessing particularly relevant for twenty-first century readers. In addition, Ridout notes the connections between maternity and colonialism in Lessing’s fiction evident in the conflicts between mothers and daughters that take place at the boundaries between house and bush or wilderness. Pat Louw focuses on this theme in her essay on Lessing’s early short stories set in Africa. Louw analyses both gender and genre with regard to the colonial division of space between a feminine domestic indoors and a natural outdoor veld coded as masculine – a dichotomy Lessing avoids in the novella Alfred and Emily by setting it entirely in England and by cancelling her own birth, though her later sketches in that volume repeatedly contemplate the effects on her of maternal conflict and of the African milieu. In these African stories, Louw says, Lessing constructs ‘complex subjectivities’ across the ‘boundaries in colonial space’ (27). Louw emphasizes the flexibility and fluidity of ‘cultural identity’ in terms of such border crossings, which ‘can alter the construction of identity in the human subject as it often involves the crossing of psychological and social barriers’ simultaneously (41). Connections with nature appear not only in the African short stories, but as Fiona Becket notes, also in Lessing’s later fables of the ‘postnatural’, ‘postmodern’ and ‘posthuman’, including Mara and Dann (1999). In these novels humans weakly seek to adapt to vast ecological and political transformations, confirming Lessing’s judgement that individual lives often seem ‘a series of adjustments to arbitrary pressures’ (Alfred and Emily 101). However, according to Becket, Lessing’s people can rarely ‘learn from history’ (133). In the essays of Alfred and Emily, she even records one unsettling incident of ‘watching history being unmade, the past forsworn’, when an African denies the prior existence of her childhood house (229). Although Becket credits Lessing’s insights into the connections between imperialism and economic neo-colonialism in her writings about Afghanistan, she critiques Lessing for

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still being too much of a humanist, ‘strangely incapable of properly seeing through, properly completing, the (necessary) interrogation of human centrality’ (135). In these late fables, Becket finds, Lessing simplifies both people and nature to a binary world of prey and predators, heroes and followers, as puny humans face a terrifying non-human nature. In such fictions, Becket argues, ‘Lessing also manipulates, even satirises, the conceptual pleasures of the fantasy journey back to nature’ (140). Most of the chapters in this volume defend Lessing’s sophistication as a writer, although a few also level critiques. Writing on Lessing’s penultimate fiction, The Cleft (2007), Phyllis Perrakis analyses the role of the Roman patriarch who mediates between supposedly ancient myth and the contemporary reader, claiming that the comic fable of how males entered an all-female world is contextualized as the reader apprehends the narrator’s masculinist and elitist mindset. Perrakis details the moral and psychological evolution of the narrator and defends the novel, denounced by some critics as just bad writing, from charges of authorial fatigue. Instead, she claims that in it Lessing mounts a sophisticated critique of humanity’s ‘imperialistic desires’ and ‘immature attitudes toward gender and sexuality’ (155). While his chapter on The Golden Notebook fits the chronological treatment of Lessing’s writings in this volume, Nick Bentley makes a case for that novel as a ‘radically experimental’ work that stands ‘outside this model of Lessing’s writing as linear progression’ (44). I’ve previously remarked that The Golden Notebook ‘purports to be the history of an effort to understand history and the fiction of the effort to understand fiction’ (Gardiner 144). Bentley similarly comments that the novel is ‘a critical and philosophical investigation into the nature of fiction itself and the relationship between literary form and politics’ (44). According to Bentley, The Golden Notebook fits Marxist literary theory in expressing ‘a subjective personal experience set against an underlying objective socio-economic framework’ (46–7). Lessing is fully original, he argues, in the way that the structure of her text ‘succeeds in blurring the distinction between real and fictional, forcing the reader into engaging in actual socio-political debates’ (52). Her later writings, including Alfred and Emily, also continue to prod the reader with their explorations of the borders of the ‘real and the fictional’. Taken as a whole, the critical essays in this volume spotlight a great swath of Lessing’s writings but also leave rich terrain for scholars to explore. The essays here analyse Lessing’s writings with reference to contemporary theories and social contexts, particularly those of colonialism, imperialism and the western patriarchal nuclear family. Ruth Robbins compares Lessing’s writing with that of her contemporaries, and future work could

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consider further the permeable border between her sources and literary influences. Other future critical projects could include more attention thematically to social class, generically to the later short stories and sketches, and aesthetically to Lessing’s stylistic experiments. Another topic would be the development of Lessing’s political thought that includes all the nonfiction and even her repudiated but revealing novel, Retreat to Innocence (1956). Re-assessment of her entire canon would locate Lessing in an evolving literary history of Anglophone world literature. The defence of Lessing’s artistry is a theme throughout this volume, with Watkins praising her ‘generic and formal complexity that masquerades as naïve realism’ and Perrakis celebrating her ‘parodic postmodern intertexuality associated with historiographic metafiction’ (76, 151). I conclude that as this volume demonstrates, the time has come to stake Lessing’s claim as one of the twentieth century’s most accomplished and significant writers.

Works Cited Gardiner, Judith Kegan. Rhys, Stead, Lessing, and the Politics of Empathy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Lessing, Doris. Alfred and Emily. New York: Harper, HarperCollins Publishers, 2008.

Index

abjection and the abject 3, 15–25, 78, 94, 100–3, 162 Adam and Eve 151 Afghanistan 133, 164 Africa 32, 70, 137, 139–40, 161 African 4, 5, 15, 17, 19–20, 26–30, 33, 38, 113, 162, 164 African houses, farms and homesteads 26, 28, 31, 34, 37 African landscape, bush and veld 5, 27–38, 40–1, 114–15, 118, 164 African Stories 26–43 African tribe 37–8 “Against Georg Lukács” 49 Agatucci, Cora 76 aging 76–8, 82, 84, 143, 156, 157n, 163 Ahmed, Sara 20, 24n Alfred and Emily 2, 114, 160–5 Algarve 86 ‘alienation technique’ 51, 52 America 131 American 7, 89, 100, 101, 108, 129 Anderson, Benedict 117 “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?” 54–5 anti-pastoral 30–1, 40 Appignanesi, Lisa 81, 88, 157n Archbishop Desmond Tutu see Tutu, Archbishop Desmond Arlett, Robert 50 Armitt, Lucie 61 Artemis 151 Ashcroft, Bill 4–5, 126n At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now 111–12 Atwood, Margaret 83, 113

Australia 81 authorship 10, 52–3, 75–80, 84, 88–9, 163 autobiography and autobiographical 3–5, 10, 28, 66, 84, 88, 99, 104n, 107, 113, 115–16, 122, 126n, 161–3 Bakhtin, Mikhail 78 Balfour, Robert 32 Balibar, Etienne 57n Barnes, Julian 57, 103 Barthes, Roland 53, 58n, 78 Bedell, Geraldine 148, 157n Benhabib, Seyla 58n Ben in the World 72, 147, 157n Berg, Mari-Ann 78 Berger, John 57 Berliner Ensemble 51 Bhabha, Homi 117–20, 126n, 160 Bigsby, Christopher 49 “Birth” 93, 101 Blau du Plessis, Rachel 8 Bloom, Harold 1, 124n Booker Prize 83 border and boundary crossings 2–3, 5, 12, 15, 21, 27, 31–8, 40–1, 45, 61–2, 65, 69, 71–2, 76, 80, 82, 89, 92–3, 95, 103, 107, 124, 143, 147, 149, 160 Bourdieu, Pierre 57n, 80–1, 87, 160 Bowker, Veronica 27 breast feeding and breast milk 15, 19–23, 162 Brecht, Bertolt 11, 49–57, 58n, 160 Brennan, Timothy 111–13, 120–1 Briefing for a Descent into Hell 61, 73n

168 Britain and British 2–3, 7–8, 10–11, 12n, 21, 24n, 28, 33, 45, 57, 58n, 63, 82, 107–8, 113, 114–15, 118, 122, 132, 158n Brooke, Rupert 114 Brookner, Anita 83 Buckton, Oliver 30 Bulgaria 24n Butler, Judith 9–10, 77 Callil, Carmen 81 Canopus in Argos: Archives 61, 83 Capra, Frank 162 Carson, Rachel 130–4, 160 Carter, Angela 83 Cassandra 133–4 celebrity 75, 79–80, 89 Chanter, Tina 18 Chennells, Anthony 29–31 Chernobyl 134 child birth 68, 92–6, 101, 104n Children of Violence series 3, 46, 63, 121 Cleft, The 3, 12, 143–59, 165 Coetzee, J. M. 30, 83 Cohen, Robin 107–10 Cold War 131–2 colonial and colonialism 4–7, 20, 26–7, 29, 31–9, 41, 87, 107, 111, 113, 116–17, 124, 126n, 134, 140, 161–2, 164, 165 colonizer and colonized 15, 28–9, 33, 37, 117, 162 colony 6–7 Columbine 99 Communism and the Communist Party 1–2, 4–6, 8, 10–11, 12n, 79, 107–9 Conrad, Joseph 27 ‘contact zones’ 116 cosmopolitanism 6–7, 107–11, 113, 119, 120–2, 163 Cosslett, Tess 92, 104n Crossman, Richard H. 12n Cuban Missile Crisis 131 ‘Dann’ or ‘Ifrik’ series 129–42 Danziger, Marie 58n

Index Dawson, Carrie 81 “Death of the Author, The” 53, 58n, 78 Devon 122 “De Wets come to Kloof Grange, The” 32–3 Diana, Roman Goddess 151 Diaries of Jane Somers, The 76–89 Diary of a Good Neighbour, The 76, 82–3, 89 Doessekker, Bruno see Wilkomirski, Binjamin Douglas, Mary 93–4 Drabble, Margaret 81 Draine, Betsy 57n Eagleton, Mary 80, 87 Eakin, Kay Branaman 122, 125n East Africa 64 Edge of the Sea, The 132 Eiseley, Loren 73n Elliott, Jane 124n empathy 78, 96, 101, 143–59 England 28–9, 32, 65, 67, 116, 118, 122, 161 English 7, 32–3, 114–15, 119, 122–3 Englishman 21, 120 environmentalism and eco-politics 129–42 Essex 122 Europe and European 27, 29, 31–2, 36, 38, 61, 135–7, 139 Eve see Adam and Eve fable 61, 73n, 129–32, 134–7, 140, 143, 147–8, 152, 158n, 161, 164, 165 Fahim, Shadia S 57n fairytale 36, 62, 68–9, 73n, 99 fantasy and the fantastic 2, 61–5, 67–72, 83, 130, 140, 161, 163, 165 Feminine Mystique, The 97 feminism and feminist 1–2, 8–10, 79, 99 “Field of Cultural Production; or the Economic World Reversed, The” 80 Fifth Child, The 61–2, 67–9, 71–2, 73n, 92–104, 147, 157n, 162–3 First World War 3, 114–15, 135, 161 Flannery, Tim 132

Index Flaubert’s Parrot 103 “Flavours of Exile” 32 Florida Keys 132 Foot, Paul 10 Foucault, Michel 78–9, 160 Four-Gated City, The 61–5, 67, 70–2, 121, 132–4, 163–4 France 24n Frankenstein 73n, 99 Friedan, Betty 97 Fullbrook, Kate 80 Galloway, Janice 57 Gamallo, Isabel C. Anievas 73n Gamble, Sarah 17 gardens and gardening 32–4, 40, 64, 66, 70, 112, 135 Gardiner, Judith Kegan 12n, 78 Gee, Maggie 81, 86–8 Gender Trouble 9 genre 2–3, 22, 31, 45, 61–2, 69, 72, 82–6, 88, 92–7, 99–100, 102–3, 111, 113, 118, 143, 158n, 163, 164 Gifford, Terry 31, 40 “Glory of Women” 114 Going Home 10, 29, 31 Golden Notebook, The 1, 3–12, 12n, 24n, 44–58, 83, 116, 121, 145, 157n, 165 Good Terrorist, The 83 gothic 73n, 83 Granada 76 Grandmothers, The 158n Grass is Singing, The 3, 15–25, 27, 30, 46, 61, 76, 120, 162 Gray, Alasdair 57 Great War, The see First World War Greene, Gayle 8–9, 78, 88–9 Griffiths, Gareth 4–5, 126n Hall, Stuart 41 Handmaid’s Tale, The 83 Hanson, Clare 16 Harvey, David 107 Head, Dominic 57 Heart of Darkness 27 Henke, Suzette 58n ‘historiographic metafiction’ 143, 149, 153, 157n, 158n, 166

169

Hite, Molly 52, 58n homophobia 6, 9, 12n Hopkins, Gerard Manley 31 Hotel du Lac 83 Huggan, Graham 81 Hunter, Eva 29 Hunter, Ian 79 Hurricane Katrina 140, 141n Hutcheon, Linda 143, 149, 153, 157n, 158n identity 9–10, 17, 20, 30, 33, 35–8, 40–1, 103, 110, 146, 164 authorial identity 10, 76–9, 82, 87–9 If the Old Could 76 ‘Ifrik’, concept of and relation to Africa 139, 140 ‘Ifrik’ or ‘Dann’ series 129–42 imperial and imperialism 27–8, 30, 35, 116–17, 133, 155–7, 158n, 164, 165 Imperial Land Bank 27 “Impertinent Daughters” 73n Impressionist 97 India 108 ‘inner-space fiction’ 44, 61 In Pursuit of the English 120, 126n Interaction International 121 “Intimations” 92 Iran 3 Irish 122 It’s a Wonderful Life 162 Jackson, Rosemary 62, 69–71 Jamaica 85 Jameson, Fredric 12, 132 Jewish, faked authorial identity 81 Jonathan Cape 76 Jordan, Judith 145, 157n Kafka, Franz 71 Kantian sublime 54–5 Kaplan, Carey 124 Keith, Michael 41 Kelman, James 57 Kennedy, Dale 37–9 Kent 122 Kermanshah 3 Kerridge, Richard 134

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Index

Khrushchev 10 Kirwan-Taylor, Helen 125n Kline, Malcolm A. 1, 125n Koestler, Arthur 12n Krasner, James 78 Kristeva, Julia 15–25, 93–4, 104n, 120, 126n, 160, 162 LaCapra, Dominick 144, 148–50, 154 Lawrence, D. H. 100 Lear, Linda 131 Lee, Hermione 89, 90n Le Guin, Ursula 157n, 158n “Leopard George” 39–40 Lessing, Gottfried 3, 10, 89 Levinas, Emmanuel 96, 160 Lewis, C. S. 65 liberal humanism 56 Life and Times of Michael K 83 Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The 65 London 2, 3, 7, 75, 89, 97, 107, 110, 112, 113, 126n Looking Awry 134 Lukács, Georg 11, 45–9, 56, 160 Lyall, Sarah 2, 107, 113, 118 Lyotard, Jean-François 54–6, 129–30, 132 Macherey, Pierre 57n Making of the Representative for Planet 8, The 130, 134 Mara and Dann 129, 135–41, 158n, 164 Margaroni, Maria 24n marketing literature 75–6, 81 Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five, The 152, 155 Martha Quest 31 Marxist theory 2, 45, 56, 165 Maslen, Elizabeth 97 maternal nursing see breast feeding maternity and motherhood 2, 4, 9, 66, 68–9, 71, 73n, 92–8, 100–4, 104n, 162, 164 May, Jon 27 Mazel, David 129, 132 McCooey, David 81 McCormick, Kay 35

McCourt, Frank 104n McDermott, Sinead 80 McKibbens, Bill 129 McVeagh, Emily Maude 3, 73, 89 Meaning of Contemporary Realism, The 45 Memoirs of a Survivor 61–2, 65–7, 69–70, 72, 73n, 121, 157n, 163–4 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 15, 20, 24n, 160 meta-criticism 44, 56 metafiction and metafictional 3, 47, 52–3, 83, 143, 147, 149, 153, 157n, 166 Metamorphosis 71 Michael, Magali Cornier 58n Michael Joseph (publisher) 76 misery memoir 99, 104n Monet, Claude 97 monster and monstrous 68, 73n, 95, 97, 99, 102–3, 138, 144, 146–7, 149–50, 152, 162 Mootoo, Shani 157n Mother Courage 51 Moyers, Bill 113 Mugabe, Robert 5 Mullan, John 79 Murphy, Patrick D. 136 Nairobi 63, 64, 70 Nead, Lynda 92, 104n New Left 45, 51 New Orleans 140 Nicolson, Paula 104n Nietzsche, Friedrich 138 Nights at the Circus 83 Nobel Prize and Acceptance Speech 1–4, 7, 9, 24n, 75–6, 78, 82, 89, 90n, 107, 112–13, 118, 124, 126n, 160 Nolan, Maggie 81 Norfolk 122 North Africa 137 nostalgia 4, 11, 48, 116, 137 Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution 92 “Old Chief Mshlanga, The” 36–8 Ong, Walter 97

Index Oranges are not the Only Fruit 83 Oryx and Crake 113 Parry, Benita 119 pastoral 30–1, 40, 97 Pearson, Nicholas 90n Pelzer, Dave 104n Persia 2, 3, 32, 107, 108, 113 Pifer, Ellen 73n Pile, Steve 41 Pinsky, Robert 110 Plath, Sylvia 100–1 Play with a Tiger 51 Pollock, David C 108–11, 113, 118, 121–2, 125n Port, Cynthia 82 Portugese 85 postcolonial 2, 4–8, 41, 81, 107, 113, 119, 126n, 139 post-human 130, 135, 164 postmodernism 8, 16, 45, 54–7, 58n, 83, 130–2, 135, 143, 151, 157n, 164, 166 postnatural 129, 132, 135, 139, 164 post-pastoral 31, 40 Powers of Horror 16, 20, 93–4 Pratt, Mary Louise 116–17 “Preface” to The Golden Notebook 3, 9, 53–4 pregnancy 67–8, 92–3, 98, 100 Prisons We Choose to Live Inside 121 Rabellato, Dan 57n Rainbow, The 100 realism and realist 2, 11, 16–17, 44–51, 54, 56–7, 61–3, 65, 83–5, 88, 97, 110–11, 123–4, 126n, 161, 163 Rege, Josna 78 Retreat to Innocence 166 Rhodesia and Zimbabwe 2–6, 10, 15, 19, 24n, 29, 30, 61, 75, 107–8, 112–13, 115, 122 Rich, Adrienne 92, 160 Rich, Motoko 2, 107, 113, 118 Ripple from the Storm, A 10, 46 Robbins, Paul 7 Romantic conception of author 79

171

Romantic poets 30 Rome 143, 154–5, 157n Rose, Ellen Cronan 124 Rosner, Victoria 27–8, 31, 34, 126n Rusby, Ruth 121 Sassoon, Siegfried 114 Saunders, David 79 Schama, Simon 29 Schlueter, Paul 18, 23n, 58n Schreiner, Olive 30 science fiction 1–3, 61, 79, 83, 107, 136 Scotland 64, 122 Scottish 63 Seaman, Paul Asbury 122 “Second Coming, The” 93 Second International Doris Lessing Conference 7, 125n Second World War 11, 162 settler culture, society and community 4–5, 7, 26–30, 32, 34, 38, 40, 41, 108 Sexton, Anne 104n Shelley, Mary 73n Shikasta 148, 157n, 158n short story 3, 31, 50, 61 Shriver, Lionel 94, 99–104 Silent Spring 130–1 Simons, Judy 80 Sirian Experiment, The 83 “Small Personal Voice, The” 11, 46, 49, 51, 122–3 Snyder, Gary 40 “Soldier, The” 114 Solomon, Deborah 2 Somers, Jane 76, 78, 83, 87, 89, 163 Somerset 122 South Africa 30, 33, 48, 116, 120, 122 Southeast Asia 86 Southern Africa 4, 7, 11, 27, 29, 161 Soviet Union 10, 133 space fiction 79, 155, 157n, 161 Spain 86 Spanish 85 speculative fiction 1–2, 61, 65, 130 Sprague, Claire 12n, 24n Squires, Claire 81

172

Index

Stalin 10 Stevenson, Anne 93, 101 Storti, Craig 123 “Story of a Non-Marrying Man” 38–9 Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter Griot and the Snow Dog, The 130, 137, 158n subjectivity, subject and self 15, 17–18, 20–1, 27, 30–2, 40–1, 45, 55, 89, 92, 94, 96, 102–3, 117, 119, 134, 144, 148, 150, 156 sublime 54–5 Suffolk 122 Swedish Academy, Stockholm 90n Sweetest Dream, The 6 Swift, Graham 57 Sydney 133 Takolander, Maria 81 Taylor, Alfred Cook 3, 89 Taylor, Emily Maude see McVeagh, Emily Maude Tennant, Emma 57 ‘Third Culture Kid’ 6, 107–28, 163 ‘Third Space’ 117 This Was the Old Chief’s Country 29 Thomson, Peter 57n Thrift, Nigel 27 Tiffin, Helen 4–5, 126n Tiger, Virginia 24n, 78, 89, 125n ‘TimeSpace’ 27 Todorov, Tsvetan 61–2, 65, 69, 71 Tomalin, Claire 95 “Traitors” 24–36 trauma 144, 147–9, 161, 162 Tuan, Yi-Fu 26, 160 Tutu, Archbishop Desmond 139 Tynan, Kenneth 51, 57n Tyner, James 30 Under My Skin 5, 10, 12n, 28, 107–28, 163 United Kingdom 4, 7, 8, 75, 83, 90n

United States 7, 131 Useem, Ruth Hill 108–9, 113 Van Reken, Ruth E. 108–11, 113, 118, 122, 125n Vertovec, Steven 107–10 Vice, Sue 81 Vietnamese 85 Virago 81 Walder, Dennis 125n Walking in the Shade 10, 51, 126n Wallace, Diana 78, 82, 89 Warner, Allan 57 Warner, Marina 104n Warnock, Jeanie 157n Watkins, Susan 157n, 158n Waugh, Patricia 57, 58n Weather Makers, The 132 We Need To Talk About Kevin 92, 94, 95, 99–104 Wertsch, Mary Edwards 125n White, Hayden 150, 157n White, John 58n Whittaker, Ruth 58n Wilkomirski, Binjamin 81 Willet, John 51, 57n Williams, Raymond 46, 57n, 120 Wilson, Francis 89 Wind Blows Away Our Words, The 133–5 Winterson, Jeanette 57, 83 Wisdom, Frank Charles 3, 89 Wordsworth, William 92–3, 101 World War I see First World War Writing the Environment 134 Wyatt-Brown, Anne 157n Yeats, W. B. 93 Yokohama, Japan 108 Young, Robert 24n Zimbabwe see Rhodesia and Zimbabwe Žižek, Slovoj 130–1, 134, 140, 141n, 160